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ESSAYS    ON    BOOKS 


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ESSAYS  ON  BOOKS 


BY 

A.   CLUTTON-BROCK 


NEW    YORK 

E.    P.    DUTTON    AND    COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 


PRINTED    IN    GREAT   BRITAI* 


CO 
-y 


PREFACE 


THESE  Essays  are  all  reprinted  from  the 
Literary  Supplement  of  The  Times,  with 
a  few  corrections  and  a  few  passages  left  out. 
Some  of  the  essays  were  written  on  particular 
occasions,  the  death  of  a  writer  or  the  anni- 
versary of  his  birth  or  death.  These  consist 
chiefly  of  praise,  but  I  was  glad  of  the  chance 
to  praise  great  men,  especially  Swinburne,  who 
is  now  suspected  by  the  old  and  neglected  by 
the  young.  The  essay  on  Shakespeare  was  a 
^  task  set  me ;  yet  I  enjoyed  writing  it  when 
^  forced  to  do  so.  The  essays  on  the  Brontes 
o  and  on  Turgenev  were  provoked  by  books 
with  which,  in  spite  of  their  merits,  I  dis- 
agreed more  than  I  agreed.  I  reprint  them 
because  the  opinions  I  oppose  in  them  are, 
I  think,  common. 

A.   CLUTTON-BROCK 

GODALMING 

October  1920 


CONTENTS 


Shakespeare 
Shakespeare's  Sonnets 


The  Prose  Romances  of  William  Morris     27 


Dickens   .... 

Algernon  Charles  Swinburne 

The  Wonderful  Visitor 

Donne's  Sermons 

The  Brontes 

dostoevsky 

The  Promise  of  Keats 

The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 

The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 

turgenev  .... 

The     Clash     of     East    and     West     in 
Thought 


PAGE 
I 

15 


39 
54 
67 
78 
92 
104 

"5 

129 
142 
157 

169 


ESSAYS  ON  BOOKS 

Shakespeare       ^       y^       ,<>       .^       o 

(  Written  for  the  Tercentenary  of  his  death) 

WE  know  little  about  Shakespeare,  yet 
we  may  be  sure  that  he  would  be 
surprised  rather  than  pleased  to  find  that  he 
had  become  an  institution.  If  I  must  be  an 
institution — we  can  fancy  him  saying — let  it 
be  called  Bacon  rather  than  Shakespeare.  But 
the  desire  to  call  the  institutional  Shakespeare 
Bacon  is  inevitable ;  for,  if  all  these  plays  are 
perfect,  if  they  always  manifest  omniscience, 
omnipotence,  and  the  loftiest  intentions,  they 
must  have  been  produced  by  a  god ;  and  we  do 
know  enough  about  Shakespeare  to  be  sure 
that  he  was  not  like  a  god.  We  know  that  he 
was  something  of  a  hack,  like  Mozart  and 
Tintoret;  he  wrote  to  earn  his  living,  and 
did  not  care  much  what  became  of  his  plays 
after  they  had  been  acted.  He  never  even  had 
a  university  education,  and  there  are  one  or 
A  I 


Essays  on  Books 

two  scandalous  stories  about  him.  How  could 
such  a  man  become  an  institution  ?  One  could 
not  imagine  him  even  a  Trustee  of  the  British 
Museum,  like  the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury  or 
the  Lord  Chancellor.  These  are  the  men  fit 
to  become  institutions — and  there  was  a  con- 
temporary Lord  Chancellor  capable  of  any- 
thing, a  miiversal  genius.  Not  an  artist, 
perhaps,  but  Shakespeare*'s  plays  have  ceased 
to  be  works  of  art  since  they  became  perfect ; 
we  do  not  enjoy  them  so  much  as  the  sense 
that  we  are  doing  our  duty  to  our  King  and 
Country  when  we  read  them  or  see  them — well, 
not  acted,  but  presented. 

If  Shakespeare  could  see  them  acted  now  he 
would  know  how  unworthy  he  was  to  have 
written  them.  For  this  kind  of  performance, 
he  would  say,  I  should  have  written  something 
quite  different ;  and  if  he  could  read  some  of 
the  books  about  him,  he  would  say — For  this 
kind  of  criticism  I  ought  to  have  written  some- 
thing no  less  different.  In  fact,  he  would  not 
know  himself  at  all  in  that  institution  whose 
tercentenary  we  are  now  celebrating,  and  he 
might  wish  that  we  should  celebrate  it  by 
abolishing  it.  For  artists  have  their  peculiar 
vanities,  and  one  of  them  is  a  desire  to  be 
liked  for  what  they  have  done  best.  The  real 
2 


Shakespeare 

Shakespeare  must  have  known  quite  well  that, 
like  other  human  beings,  he  did  not  always 
do  his  best ;  but  this  institutional  Shakespeare 
always  did  his  best,  and  therefore  he  is  not  a 
human  being  and  so  not  an  artist.  He  is 
praised  indiscriminately  for  passages  of  which 
the  real  Shakespeare  must  have  been  a  little 
ashamed,  if  he  ever  remembered  them,  and  of 
which  he  would  certainly  not  care  to  be  re- 
minded ;  and  the  effect  of  this  praise  is  to 
make  him  seem  almost  a  dull  writer.  But  the 
real  Shakespeare,  unlike  some  of  the  greatest 
poets,  was  at  great  pains  not  to  be  dull ;  he 
was  an  entertainer  who  succeeded  because 
he  was  himself  much  entertained  with  life  ; 
he  could  be  amused  even  by  bores,  and  so  he 
could  make  them  amusing.  But  the  bores 
have  had  their  posthumous  revenge  upon  him  ; 
they  have  almost  persuaded  us  that  he  is  too 
great  and  good  to  be  amusing,  and  they  have 
made  a  practice  of  quoting  in  speeches  and 
books  those  passages  from  him  which  are  least 
amusing,  which,  divorced  from  their  context, 
seem  almost  dull. 

As   an    artist  Shakespeare    has   been    more 
sinned  against  than  sinning,  and  yet  he  cer- 
tainly sinned.     He  wrote  from  hand  to  mouth, 
and  was  often   content  with    his  second  best 
3 


Essays  on  Books 

both   in   conception   and   in   execution.     We 
may  guess  that  he  had  an  itch   for  writing, 
which  was  encouraged   by  his  enormous  pro- 
fessional facility.      No  doubt  he  enjoyed  his 
own  rhetoric,  enjoyed  writing  it  and  hearing 
it  spouted  on  the  stage  ;  but  he  would  not  have 
enjoyed  hearing  a  bore  quote  it  as  if  it  were 
gospel.     He  knew  well  enough  that  his  rhetoric 
was  only  a  useful  makeshift,  even  if  he  had 
the   Elizabethan  love   of  it.      At  that  time 
rhetoric  was  a  new  weapon,  as  sweeping  ges- 
tures were  to  the  painters  of  the  Cinquecento. 
The  Elizabethan  felt  that  he  owed  some  rhetoric 
to  his  audience,  and  when  he  wished  to  ease 
their  minds  from   the  strain   of  rapid  events 
he  turned  it  on  as  a  modern  playwright  might 
turn    on    epigram.     The  actors    declaimed    it 
swiftly  and  the  audience  liked  it,  as  we  like 
the  arpeggios  of  a  virtuoso  pianist ;  yet  it  was 
not  meant  to  be  listened  to  very  closely.     But 
now,  with  our  modern  habit  of  reading  Shake- 
speare rather  than  acting  him,  we  do  listen  to 
Shakespeare's  rhetoric  closely,  and  pedants  tell 
us  that  it  is  all  high  poetry.     What  is  more, 
actors   declaim  it   as  if  it    were    the   funeral 
oration  of  Pericles,  and   so   slowly  that  they 
are  forced  to  cut  Shakespeare's  best  to  make 
room    for    it.     So    there  are   some   who    are 
4 


Shakespeare 

tempted   to    revolt    against    him    as    a   mere 
rhetorician. 

He  was  a  great  rhetorician,  but  not 
because  he  trusted  in  rhetoric.  Among  the 
chief  poets  of  the  world  there  is  none  who  can 
let  himself  go  so  completely  as  Shakespeare, 
none  who  can  surrender  himself  so  utterly  to  a 
conception  and  to  an  execution  worthy  of  it. 
But  he  needed  to  practise  this  power  of  sur- 
render both  in  his  conception  and  in  his  execu- 
tion. We  may  guess  that,  provided  he  made 
himself  capable  of  the  highest,  he  did  not  care 
much  if  he  often  fell  below  it  in  the  process. 
He  was  not  a  sublime  egotist  and  he  had  no 
egotistical  love  of  perfection.  What  he  de- 
sired was  to  be  equal  to  the  Heaven-sent 
moment  when  it  came ;  and  he  never  knew 
when  it  would  come  in  the  course  of  his  trade. 
He  was  cleverer  even  than  Fletcher — no  one 
ever  was  so  clever  as  Shakespeare — but  his 
cleverness  was  tolerable  to  him  only  because 
he  could  rise  through  it  when  the  Heaven-sent 
moment  came.  Worldlings  make  the  best 
saints,  and  Shakespeare  is  the  worldling  among 
all  the  great  saints  of  poetry.  Much  nonsense 
has  been  talked  about  his  omniscience,  but  he 
did  know  more  about  the  art  of  literature  than 
any  other  poet,  because  he  practised  more  of 
5 


Essays  on  Books 

it ;  and  he  alone  of  all  the  greatest  poets  of 
the  world  was  able  to  enrich  his  masterpieces 
with  the  whole  art  of  literature.      Hamlet  is 
a    masterpiece    like    the    Divhie    Comedy    or 
the  Iliad  or  the  Agamemnon^  but  how  much 
more  amusing  it  is  than  any  of  those  works. 
The  Prince  of  Denmark  is   a  figure   of  high 
poetry  like  Milton's  Prince  of  Darkness,  yet 
we  know  him  as  well  as   Peter  in  War   aiui 
Peace,  while  Polonius  and  Osric  are  as  near  to 
us  as  anyone  in  Dickens.     In  the  Fool  in  King 
Lear  Dickens  and  iEschylus  are,  as  it  were, 
fused,  and  in  Cordelia,  Sophocles  and  Dostoev- 
sky.     For  Cordelia  is   something  of  a  shrew ; 
we  can  project  her  into  the  modern  home  as 
we  could  not  project  Antigone.     We  can  see 
her  in  the  clothes  of  to-day ;  we  could  marry 
her  even  and  be  a  little  afraid  of  her  fierceness 
or  lovingly  amused  by  it.     These  are  all  figures 
that  could  be  translated  without  incongruity 
into  comedy ;    for  Shakespeare  lived  in   that 
world,  too,  lived  and  moved  and  had  his  being 
in  it.     He  rose  out  of  prose  into  poetry  as 
naturally  as   Mozart   rose  into  melody.      He 
was   a    professional    writer,    but   not   a   pro- 
fessional   poet     like    Milton    or    Dante;    he 
practised  no  austerities  of  art  or  of  experience, 
but  opened   his  mind   to    earth    and  heaven, 
6 


Shakespeare 

living  and  writing  as  if  he  were  just  an  ordinary 
man  with  a  gift. 

We  say  livings,  because  in  spite  of  the  little 
that  is  known  about  hiin  we  know  that  his 
art  must  express  the  life  of  his  mind.  He 
must  have  lived  more  largely  than  Dante  or 
Milton,  must  have  wasted  his  time  more,  have 
been  less  fastidious  with  himself  and  with 
others.  Of  all  the  great  poets,  he  is  the 
most  at  ease  with  prose  and  with  the  prose 
way  of  thinking.  The  difference  between 
prose  and  poetry  in  works  of  imagination 
is  mainly  in  speed  of  thought ;  and  Shake- 
speare could  think  fast  or  slow  as  the  mood 
took  him ;  he  could  linger  like  an  epicure 
over  the  character  of  men  and  things  even 
when  they  were  ugly  or  absurd,  where  Milton 
would  have  rushed  past  them  in  angry  im- 
patience. It  was  indeed  the  peculiar  power 
of  his  imagination  to  conceive  a  tragedy  in 
relation  to  the  whole  diverse,  incoherent  world 
of  reality,  and  to  preserve  the  diversity,  the 
incoherence,  the  inattention  of  it  all,  even  at 
the  tragic  height.  There  are  other  tragedies 
as  intense  as  King  Lear^  but  there  is  none  of 
equal  intensity  so  rich  in  content,  none  so 
closely  connected  with  the  world  as  we  know 
it,  none  so  full  of  characters  that  we  should 
7 


Essays  on  Books 

recognize  if  we  met  them.  And  because  the 
characters  are  thus  fully  drawn,  the  tragic 
conflict  between  them  is  sharper  than  it  ever 
is  between  the  noble  shadows  of  the  Greek 
drama.  There  is  a  struggle  of  actual  flesh 
and  blood ;  there  are  secrets  revealed  about 
ourselves,  as  in  Dostoevsky  ;  but  it  is  Dostoevsky 
set  to  music  and  with  ten  times  the  power  of 
expression  that  any  novelist  ever  had.  The 
novelist  can  tell  us  about  his  characters' 
emotions,  but  Shakespeare  can  make  their 
emotions  as  strong  to  us  as  to  themselves. 
He  can  put  into  words,  not  merely  the  subtlety, 
but  also  the  force,  of  states  of  the  soul ;  he 
has  the  science  of  the  psychologist  and  the 
music  of  the  poet  combined  as  no  one  has 
combined  them  before  or  since. 

This  combination  is  his  peculiar  excellence ; 
and  his  form  is  made  to  suit  it.  We  never 
see  that  form  in  his  plays  as  they  are  commonly 
acted  now,  nor  can  we  be  fully  aware  of  it 
when  we  read  them.  For  his  method  is,  as  it 
were,  to  assume  a  rushing  current  of  events 
and  to  throw  a  searchlight  upon  different 
points  in  that  current.  In  the  Greek  drama 
the  convention  is  that  all  the  action  is  presented 
on  the  stage  except  what  is  related.  The 
audience  knows  all  the  facts  from  first  to  last, 
8 


Shakespeare 

and  the  facts  are  carefully  selected  so  that  they 
may  all  be  known.  Shakespeare's  way  is  rather 
to  give  us  swift  glimpses  of  the  whole  actual 
complexity  of  life ;  and  his  art  is  to  choose 
them  so  that  we  see  the  connexion  between 
one  glimpse  and  another,  so  that  they  have  a 
cumulative  power  upon  us.  But  he  does  not 
aim  at  continuity,  and  to  force  any  kind  of 
continuity  upon  him,  as  is  commonly  done  in 
modern  versions  of  his  plays,  is  to  spoil  his 
form.  He  set  out  to  be  a  dramatist ;  and  we 
cannot  see  his  dramatic  greatness,  the  excel- 
lence of  his  construction,  or  the  power  which 
made  his  method  possible,  if  his  plays  are 
robbed  of  their  form.  For  he  has  the  peculiar 
power  of  making  his  characters  come  to  life 
and  be  themselves  the  moment  they  appear  on 
the  stage.  Hamlet  is  Hamlet  in  the  first 
words  he  speaks.  Language  identifies  him  as 
people  in  real  life  are  identified  by  their  faces ; 
yet  at  the  same  time  it  is  used  to  carry  on  the 
action  of  the  play,  and  things  happen  as 
swiftly  as  in  a  play  of  mere  situation.  But 
when  Hamlet  soliloquizes,  it  is  not  merely  an 
outworn  dramatic  device;  for  his  thoughts 
are  so  phrased  that  we  recognize  his  mind  as 
if  it  were  a  well-known  face.  And  this  power 
of  giving  instant  life  to  a  character  is  what 
9 


Essays  on  Books 

gives  life  also  to  Shakespeare's  form;  for, 
without  it,  there  would  be  no  continuity  in  the 
glimpses  of  his  searchlight.  It  is  the  characters 
themselves,  the  moment  they  appear,  that 
connect  one  glimpse  with  another  and  convince 
us  that  they  are  glimpses  of  a  real  world  which 
continues  in  all  its  complexity  and  richness 
between  the  glimpses.  Hamlet,  Cordelia, 
Othello,  Macbeth,  lago,  seem  to  have  a  life 
independent  of  the  play.  We  feel  that  we  see 
only  a  little  of  them  and  can  deduce  much 
more.  We  are  aware  of  their  existence  between 
the  scenes  in  which  they  appear ;  for,  when 
they  enter,  they  are  already  absorbed  in  their 
business,  and,  when  they  depart,  they  are  still 
absorbed  in  it.  That  is  where  Shakespeare 
differs  from  Ibsen,  whose  characters  live  only 
in  their  dramatic  relation  with  each  other. 
We  cannot  think  of  them  apart  from  the  play, 
for  he  seems  to  create  them  only  for  dramatic 
purposes  and  to  care  for  them  only  dramatically. 
They  are  puppets  into  which  he  breathes  life ; 
and  when  the  curtain  falls  they  are  put  back 
into  the  cupboard.  But  Shakespeare  seems  to 
throw  his  searchlight  upon  living  men  and 
women,  to  control  the  light  and  not  the 
characters.  And  he  seems  to  love  them,  too, 
as  if  they  had  been  made  by  God,  not  by 
lO 


Shakespeare 

himself;  the  world  of  his  plays  is  not  a  world 
of  his  contrivance.  In  that  he  is  like  the 
greatest  painters,  who  seem  not  to  compose 
their  pictures  but  merely  to  lay  the  emphasis 
of  their  own  delight  on  what  they  have  seen. 
There  are  people  who  will  tell  you  that  in 
construction  Shakespeare  is  a  fool  to  Ibsen ; 
but  he  was  playing  a  different  game  and  one 
more  difficult.  He  cannot  do  as  he  will  with 
his  characters  to  make  a  play,  because  they  are 
not  his  characters ;  they  have  come  to  life  in 
his  mind,  and  he  can  only  choose  his  glimpses 
of  them.  But  the  wonder  is  that  in  this 
independent  life  of  theirs  they  still  speak  with 
his  power  of  words  and  yet  out  of  their  own 
minds  and  in  their  own  character.  Hamlet 
has  all  Shakespeare's  genius  of  expression ;  he 
talks  as  Shakespeare  himself  could  talk  only 
in  the  ecstasy  of  creation ;  yet  it  is  always 
Hamlet  who  talks,  and  not  a  poet  at  large. 
And  even  at  those  moments  when  the  theme 
of  the  play  passes,  as  it  were,  into  pure  music, 
when  the  action  fades  away  and  we  see  only  a 
naked  soul  before  us  utterly  aware  of  itself  and 
its  relation  to  the  universe,  it  is  still  the  soul 
of  Hamlet  or  King  Lear  that  speaks  or  thinks, 
and  not  the  mere  comment  of  the  poet.  He 
is  always  the  dramatist,  even  when  his  drama 
II 


Essays  on  Books 

rises  above  all  circumstance  of  time  or  place ; 
when  his  characters  have  forgotten  the  world, 
he  does  not  forget  them. 

And  because  his  characters  thus  come  to 
life  in  his  mind  he  is  equal  master  of  tragedy 
and  comedy,  which  are  both  part  of  the  real 
life  of  man  and  in  a  living  man  cannot  be 
separated  for  dramatic  purposes.  Hamlet, 
Macbeth,  King  Lear  are  too  real  to  be  dignified 
always  ;  they  forget  themselves  and  forget  that 
they  are  tragic  figures.  The  world  in  which 
they  live  is  not  purely  tragic,  for  it  is  the  real 
world,  although  Shakespeare  may  give  us 
muiuly  tragic  glimpses  of  it.  And  so  Falstaff 
is  not  purely  comic.  He  possessed  Shake- 
speare's mind  and  took  on  an  independent  life 
of  his  own ;  he  was  the  first  figure  that 
Shakespeare  created  with  the  whole  of  his 
power,  and  so  the  first  that  does  not  seem  to 
have  been  created  at  all,  or  rather  does  not 
seem  to  have  been  invented.  Shakespeare  had 
perhaps  a  model  for  Falstaff;  he  began  with  a 
real  man,  but  into  him  he  was  able  to  throw 
the  whole  of  his  own  mind,  to  feed  his  growth 
with  all  his  own  faculties.  Falstaff,  belonging 
to  comedy,  is  a  prose  figure;  but  in  him 
Shakespeare  raises  prose  to  the  height  of 
poetry,  and  then,  in  Hamlet,  he  enriches  poetry 

12 


Shakespeare 

with  the  circumstance  of  prose.  So  we  may 
say  of  him  that  it  is  his  peculiar  achievement 
to  have  fused  poetry  and  prose,  giving  to  each 
the  qualities  of  the  other. 

That  may  seem  a  mere  formula  for  all  that 
passion  and  laughter  and  beauty,  and  it  sounds 
colder  still  to  say  of  him  that  he  more  than 
any  other  man  has  made  poetry  rational  and 
credible.  Yet  if  we  consider  the  beauty  of  his 
poetry,  the  heights  and  depths  of  the  soul  to 
which  he  attains,  it  is  not  cold.  The  greater 
the  weight  of  m6,tter  to  be  carried,  the  greater 
is  the  power  of  flight  needed  to  carry  it ;  the 
greater  the  mass  of  circumstance  in  a  concep- 
tion, the  greater  the  imagination  needed  to 
conceive  it.  Shakespeare's  problem  was  the 
problem  of  one  who  wrote  for  a  living,  of  one 
who  loved  life  as  it  was  too  well  to  empty 
it  of  content  for  artistic  purposes ;  and  yet  it 
was  the  problem  of  one  who  could  not  be 
content  without  making  a  music  out  of  life. 
Words  for  him  must  perform  all  their  ordinary 
functions,  yet  they  must  dance ;  men  and 
women  must  have  all  the  marks  of  circumstance 
upon  them,  yet  they  must  utter  their  immortal 
souls ;  life  must  not  be  separated  from  its 
routine  and  its  indignities,  yet  it  must  overcome 
them  both  with  laughter  and  tears  This 
13 


Essays  on  Books 

problem  he  did  not  always  solve,  for  he  was  a 
man,  like  all  great  artists,  living  desperately  in 
a  hand-to-mouth  struggle,  and  not  a  god 
conceiving  and  executing  without  haste  or 
rest.  But  it  is  his  glory  that  he  did  live  and 
work  in  such  a  way  that  he  was  able  to  solve 
this  problem,  the  hardest  that  any  writer  ever 
set  himself,  more  than  once  or  twice.  There 
are  times  when  he  rises  from  earth  to  heaven, 
trailing,  not  clouds  of  glory  with  him,  but  the 
whole  diverse  and  troubled  world  of  man,  and 
because  he  ignores  no  element  of  that  world, 
but  transfigures  it  all  in  his  music,  he  convinces 
us  that  his  music  is  true.  He  was  not  a  saint, 
but,  more  even  than  the  saints,  he  charges  our 
life  with  values,  and  when  we  have  experienced 
Hamlet  or  King  Lear  we  are  utterly  assured 
that  life,  whatever  it  brings  us,  is  worth 
experiencing. 


14 


Shakespeare's  Sonnets         o       ^o-       -o 

MANY  people  who  do  not  care  at  all 
for  poetry  take  an  interest  in  Shake- 
speare's plays  for  irrelevant  reasons.  But  you 
cannot  take  an  U'relevant  interest  in  the 
Sonnets  unless  you  want  to  know  who  Mr. 
W.  H.  was,  or  who  was  the  dark  lady,  which 
is  absurd.  The  Sonnets  are  pure  poetry,  and 
also  pure  Elizabethan  poetry.  They  belong 
to  their  time  as  much  as  Botticelli's  Prima- 
vera.  So,  of  course,  do  the  plays ;  for  the 
work  of  every  great  artist  is  rich  with  the 
character  of  his  own  time.  It  is  only  dull 
men,  half  conscious  of  their  own  dullness,  who 
fear  the  vulgarity  of  circumstance  and  try  to 
pm-ge  their  writings  of  it.  But  the  plays  are 
so  familiar  to  us,  at  least  in  quotations,  that  it 
is  easy  for  us  to  mistake  the  Elizabethan  in 
them  for  the  universal.  We  think  that  all 
poetic  plays  ought  to  be  like  them.  We  are 
taught  to  see  a  kind  of  abstract  perfection  in 
them ;  and  that  teaching  would  make  them 
seem  dull  if  Shakespeare  were  not,  luckily,  the 
15 


Essays  on  Books 

least  dull  of  all  great  writers.  As  it  is,  when 
we  forget  that  he  was  an  Elizabethan  we  miss 
much  of  his  character  and  beauty ;  for  unless 
we  understand  what  is  temporal  and  local  in  a 
great  artist,  and  see  him,  as  it  were,  flowering 
in  his  native  fields,  we  cannot  enjoy  him 
with  perfect  sincerity.  His  works  cut  off 
from  their  environment  are  like  specimens  in 
a  botanical  collection,  and  he  seems  to  have 
written  for  libraries  or  painted  for  museums. 
How  dull  does  the  poetry  of  Shakespeare 
become  when  turned  into  maxims  of  universal 
application ;  and  what  a  mass  of  dullness  has 
been  produced  by  versifiers  trying  to  write 
plays  like  his  in  circumstances  utterly  different. 
The  man  who  said  that  Hamlet  was  too  full  of 
quotations  was  wiser  than  he  knew ;  it  is 
often  quoted  by  people  who  are  not  aware  that 
it  is  either  drama  or  poetry.  But  such  people 
find  little  to  quote  in  the  Sonnets ;  and, 
though  a  few  may  read  them  to  find  out  why 
Shakespeare  wrote  them,  most  of  their  readers 
are  drawn  to  them  by  their  poetry  alone. 

We  may  be  sure  that  Shakespeare  wrote  his 
Sonnets  for  the  pleasure  of  writing  them. 
There  was  a  good  deal  of  task  work  in  his  early 
plays,  as  in  the  early  journalism  of  Meredith  ; 
but  in  the  Sonnets  there  was  only  the  dis- 
i6 


Shakespeare's  Sonnets 

interested  labour  of  a  young  artist,  and  after- 
wards of  a  master,  turning  from  the  business  of 
his  life  to  express  himself  directly.  Among  all 
the  wild  conjectures  about  the  Sonnets  one 
thing  seems  to  be  certain — namely,  that  many 
of  the  earlier  ones  were  literary  exercises 
and  that  many  of  the  later  were  not.  The 
theme  at  first  seems  artificial,  and  no  doubt 
it  was ;  the  wise  artist  chooses  an  artificial 
theme  when  he  is  too  young  to  get  one  from 
his  own  experience,  for  he  knows  that  he  must 
learn  his  art  before  he  can  use  his  experience 
of  life  in  it.  Besides,  the  young  artist  delights 
in  his  art  for  its  own  sake ;  it  is  still  a 
pleasant  game  to  him,  and  he  is  content  that 
others  should  make  the  rules  of  it.  Thus  the 
young  Shakespeare  was  glad  to  write  like  the 
other  poets  of  the  time  ;  and,  since  sonnets,  of 
one  form  or  othei-,  were  the  fashion,  he  wrote 
sonnets.  No  doubt  he  was  less  happy  in  his  choice 
of  a  theme ;  we  cannot  be  much  interested  in  his 
arguments  for  marriage ;  they  are  only  a  pre- 
text for  writing  poetry,  and  not  a  very  good 
one.  Besides,  he  sticks  too  conscientiously  to 
his  argument,  so  that  we  are  provoked  when 
we  find  that  the  wonderful  opening — 

Music  to  hear,  why  hear'st  thou  music  sadly? 
Sweets  with  sweets  war  not,  joy  delights  in  joy, 
B  17 


Essays  on  Books 

is  only  another  incitement  to  matrimony. 
This  is  as  near  to  being  abstract  poetry  as  any 
verse  can  be;  the  music  has  as  little  to  do 
with  the  theme  as  the  tunes  of  an  Italian  opera 
have  to  do  with  the  situation. 

But  we  are  not  therefore  to  suppose  that 
Shakespeare  wrote  coldly,  any  more  than  Keats 
wrote  coldly  in  Endymion.  He  was  stirred 
by  all  the  beauty  of  the  world,  and  one  beauti- 
ful thing  brought  another  to  his  mind,  as  the 
scent  of  a  flower  reminds  us  of  all  the  richness 
of  summer.  Nor  did  he  write  vaguely  as  many 
young  poets  write  when  moved  by  this  general 
passion  for  beauty.  The  chief  fault  of  his 
early  verse — a  promising  fault  in  any  young 
artist — is  an  excessive  precision.  Just  as  he 
labours  description  in  Venus  and  Adonis,  so 
he  labours  argument  in  the  early  Sonnets.  He 
never  trusts  to  luck  or  hopes  that  some  mean- 
ing will  come  of  a  combination  of  fine  sounds, 
but  makes  every  word  do  as  much  work  as  if  it 
were  in  a  legal  document.  Indeed,  all  the 
legal  terms  which  he  uses  are  only  a  sign  of 
his  passion  for  precise  expression ;  and  if  he 
had  written  nowadays  he  would  very  likely 
have  pressed  scientific  words  and  images  into 
his  service.  It  is  through  his  images  that  he 
is  drawn  more  and  more  into  reality  and  the 
l8 


Shakespeare's  Sonnets 

expression  of  his  own  experience.  Thus  it  may 
be  that,  when  in  the  twenty-first  Sonnet  he 
glances  at  a  rival  poet,  he  is  only  following  a 
fashion ;  but  continuing  the  same  theme  in 
the  twenty-third  he  starts  by  describing  what 
he  must  have  often  seen,  and  perhaps  even  felt 
himself — 

As  an  unperfect  actor  on  the  stage, 
Who  with  his  fear  is  put  beside  his  part. 

This  has  the  sudden  reality  of  Mercutio  amid 
all  the  romance  of  Romeo  and  Juliet.  Like 
him,  it  is  taken  from  life  and  foretells  a  poetry 
in  which  romance  and  reality  will  be  at  one. 

And  soon  the  reality  passes  from  images 
into  the  main  theme,  enriching,  not  destroying, 
the  romance.  It  is  Shakespeare  himself  who 
speaks  of  his  own  life  in  the  sonnet  which 
begins,  "  When  in  disgrace  w4th  fortune  and 
men's  eyes,"  not  the  Shakespeare  of  universal 
fame,  the  imaginary  tranquil  master  of  all  art 
and  knowledge,  but  one  for  whom,  as  for  all 
human  beings,  the  future  is  uncertain  and 
failure  as  frequent  as  success.  We  suppose 
that  anyone  who  could  command  the  music 
of  Shakespeare  or  Schubert  must  have  the 
world  at  his  feet ;  yet  this  music  may  have 
been  lavished  on  one  indifferent  individual,  and 
19 


Essays  on  Books 

it  only  became  the  voice  of  universal  passion 
when  the  authors  of  it  were  dumb.  We  might 
say  of  them  as  Shakespeare  says  of  the 
unknown : — 

What  is  your  substance,  whereof  are  you  made, 
That  millions  of  strange  shadows  on  you  tend? 

They  who  spoke  so  intensely  for  themselves 
seem  now  to  speak  for  every  one ;  and  their 
music  has  gathered  richness  and  meaning  from 
the  many  times  that  it  has  been  repeated  as  if 
it  were  uttered  for  the  first  time.  But  it  only 
fits  all  passion  because  it  fitted  so  exactly  the 
passion  that  first  begot  it,  and  also  because 
that  passion  itself  was  rich  with  the  love  of 
all  beautiful  things.  No  man  whose  love  is 
narrow  and  confined  to  one  single  incident  in 
his  life  can  make  poetry  out  of  it ;  a  man 
must  have  loved  many  things  before  he  can 
express  his  love  for  one ;  otherwise  he  can 
only  insist  baldly  that  he  loves,  like  the  bandit 
in  Man  and  Superman  who  cries  : — 

Mendoza  thy  lover, 

Thy  lover,  Mendoza, 

Mendoza  adoringly  lives  for  Louisa. 

There's  nothing  but  that  in  the  world  for  Mendoza. 

Louisa,  Louisa,  Mendoza  adores  thee. 

The   love  poetry  of  Shakespeare   is  full  of 
20 


Shakespeare's  Sonnets 

delight  because  it  is  enriched  and  illustrated 
with  the  love  of  many  things.  When  he  asked 
why  his  verse  was  "  so  far  from  variation  or 
quick  change''  he  named  the  very  qualities 
for  which  it  is  most  remarkable.  Yet  all  the 
variations  and  quick  changes  are  related  to 
each  other  because  they  express  the  same 
passion  for  many  different  objects.  In  this 
the  Sonnets  are  like  Love  in  the  Valley; 
they  show  us  a  whole  world  heightened  and 
glorified  by  love.  The  interested  passion  of 
one  human  being  for  another  becomes  part  of 
the  disinterested  passion  for  all  beautiful  things 
and  at  the  same  time  intensifies  it  so  that  the 
poet  can  make  as  passionate  a  music  about 
summer  as  about  love  itself — 

Not  that  the  summer  is  less  pleasant  now 
Than  when  her  mournful  hymns  did  hush 

the  night, 
But  that  wild  music  burthens  every  bough, 
And  sweets  grown  common  lose  their  dear 

delight. 

In  the  Sonnets,  as  in  Love  in  the  Valley,  love 
is  no  longer  an  incident  in  life,  but  a  state 
of  being  in  which  all  things  are  harmonized ; 
and  the  world  becomes  one  ideal  landscape, 
where  every  object  has  the  same  kind  of 
21 


Essays  on  Books 

significance.  It  is  a  heaven  of  beauty,  but  not 
a  heaven  of  happiness ;  for,  if  it  were,  it  would 
be  unreal,  and  we  might  believe  those  who  say 
that  all  the  Sonnets  are  literary  exercises. 
That  they  are  not,  is  proved  by  the  very 
sound  of  the  poefs  voice,  which  can  be  heard 
in  many  of  them  as  clearly  as  the  voice  of 
Catullus  in  his  finest  verses. 

Never  believe,  though  in  my  nature  reign'd 
All  frailties  that  besiege  all  kinds  of  blood, 
That  it  could  so  preposterously  be  stain'd, 
To  leave  for  nothing  all  thy  sum  of  good ; 
For  nothing  this  wide  universe  I  call, 
Save  thou,  my  rose  ;  in  it  thou  art  my  all. 

This  is  as  moving  as  the  poem  of  Rochester's 
in  which  he  expresses  the  fear — 

Lest,  once  more  wandering  from  that  Heaven, 

I  fall  on  some  base  heart  unblest. 
Faithless  to  thee,  false,  unforgiven, 

And  lose  my  everlasting  rest. 

True,  Shakespeare's  lines  are  full  of  the 
Elizabethan  rhetoric ;  but  that  was  natural  to 
all  poets  of  the  time.  It  was  a  habit  that  had 
become  second  nature ;  and  it  did  not  imply 
the  lack  of  real  emotion  any  more  than  the 
artificial  phrases  of  an  angry  man  nowadays 
22 


Shakespeare's  Sonnets 

imply  that  his  anger  is  feigned.  The  drama 
was  the  predominant  form  of  poetry,  and 
owing  to  its  predominance  all  poetry  tended 
to  be  rhetorical.  The  modem  sonnet  is  apt 
to  be  meditative,  as  if  the  poet  were  thinking 
aloud  in  it ;  but  the  Elizabethan  sonnet  was 
written  like  a  speech  in  a  play,  and  it  came 
naturally  to  Shakespeare  to  express  himself 
like  Berowne  or  Romeo,  heightening  his 
matter  with  all  the  arts  that  tell  on  the  stage. 
No  doubt  he  simplified  the  form  of  his  sonnets 
to  suit  his  dramatic  manner.  The  Italian 
sonnet  would  have  been  too  complicated  and 
too  slow  in  its  movement  for  his  eager 
eloquence,  which  would  not  endure  to  be 
checked  at  the  end  of  the  octave,  and  which, 
as  it  is,  often  seems  to  be  violently  reined  in 
by  the  concluding  couplet.  All  poetry  is 
artificial  in  form,  and  the  predominant  artifice, 
whatever  it  may  be,  affects  every  poet's  style, 
so  that  it  seems  more  artificial  than  it  is  in  an 
age  subject  to  a  different  poetic  convention. 
But  Shakespeare  in  his  finest  sonnets  is  as 
much  master  of  his  rhetoric  as  in  the  finest 
scenes  of  his  plays  ;  and  their  peculiar  merit 
is  this,  that  in  them  all  the  Elizabethan 
eloquence  becomes  personal,  like  the  whole 
apparatus  of  the  orchestra  in  Beethoven's 
23 


Essays  on  Books 

symphonies   or   the  Florentine  science   in  the 
drawings  of  Michelangelo. 

Ah,  do  not,  when  my  heart  hath  'scaped  this  sorrow, 
Come  in  the  rearward  of  a  conquered  woe, 
Give  not  a  windy  night  a  rainy  morrow, 
To  Hnger  out  a  purposed  overthrow. 
If  thou  wilt  leave  me,  do  not  leave  me  last, 
When  other  petty  griefs  have  done  their  spite, 
But  in  the  onset  come  ;  so  shall  I  taste 
At  first  the  very  worst  of  fortune's  might. 

The  imagery  of  these  lines  is  so  subdued  to 
the  emotion  that  we  scarcely  notice  it.  A 
smaller  artist  would  only  weaken  and  dilute 
his  passion  with  this  comparison  of  his  mis- 
fortunes to  foul  weather  ;  but  here  the  result 
is  to  make  the  passion  itself  seem  world-wide 
without  losing  any  of  its  intensity.  The 
current  of  the  verse  is  so  strong  that  it  sweeps 
all  the  images  along  with  it  and  they  quicken 
the  reader's  imagination  without  troubling  his 
understanding.  His  mind  is  never  for  a 
moment  distracted  from  the  main  theme,  yet 
that  is  enriched  by  a  wild  and  various  music 
which  no  simple  and  direct  statement  could 
contain.  Shakespeare  presses  the  wind  and 
rain  into  his  service,  and  turns  their  tempestu- 
ous sound  into  his  own  voice. 

There    are    some    great    writers    who    are 
24 


Shakespeare's  Sonnets 

naturally  disposed  to  simplicity  of  expression. 
Shakespeare  was  not  one  of  these.  Images 
swarmed  in  his  mind  so  that  he  had  no  need 
to  cast  about  for  them  ;  indeed,  he  seems  to 
have  thought  in  images.  In  modern  times 
thought  is  more  abstract ;  the  scientific  way 
of  thinking  has  affected  pure  literature,  and 
even  the  poets  are  shy  of  metaphor,  lest  it 
should  lead  them  into  artifice  and  irrelevance. 
But,  though  the  profusion  of  Elizabethan 
imagery  may  sometimes  distract  us  from  the 
main  theme,  it  is  less  artificial  than  we  are  apt 
to  suppose.  Indeed,  reasoning  seems  to  have 
grown  out  of  the  use  of  metaphor,  just  as  prose 
has  grown  out  of  poetry  ;  and  much  of  the 
Elizabethan  imagery  is  a  symptom  of  the 
eff'ort  to  reason  in  verse.  Passion  itself  be- 
came argumentative  then,  as  we  may  see  from 
the  love  poems  of  Donne ;  no  one  doubts 
that  he  expressed  his  own  feelings,  even  in  his 
most  flagrant  conceits ;  but  because  Shake- 
speare was  a  very  great  artist,  his  art,  even  at 
its  best,  is  supposed  to  prove  that  all  through 
the  Sonnets  he  was  only  playing  a  brilliant 
game.  Sometimes,  no  doubt,  he  was.  All 
young  poets,  however  full  of  passion,  will  write 
for  the  mere  pleasure  of  writing ;  and  passion 
itself  will  incite  them  to  elaborate  every  fancy 
25 


Essays  on  Books 

that  comes  into  their  minds.  Nor  is  it  strange 
that,  in  speaking  for  himself,  Shakespeare 
should  have  kept  some  of  his  dramatic  habits 
of  speech.  It  is  these  very  habits  that  give 
their  eloquence  to  the  Sonnets.  The  poet, 
used  to  set  lovers  talking  on  the  stage,  talks 
himself  like  Romeo  ;  but  it  is  more  reasonable 
to  suppose  that  he  knew  how  to  make  Romeo 
talk  because  he  was  himself  a  lover,  than  that 
he  wrote  the  Sonnets  because  he  had  got  the 
habit  of  expressing  feigned  passions  on  the 
stage. 


26 


The  Prose  Romances  of  William  Morris 


THE  prose  romances  of  William  Morris, 
except  those  two  which  have  a  political 
purpose,  are  still  little  read.  They  have  a  few 
steady  admirers,  but  most  people,  if  they  have 
heard  of  them  at  all,  have  formed  a  notion  of 
them  which  keeps  them  from  reading  them. 
They  think  that  Morris  wrote  them  to  illustrate 
some  theory  of  his  own  about  language  or 
about  beauty ;  that  they  are  a  protest  against 
prosaic  realism,  or  the  ugliness  of  modern  life, 
or  what  not.  Others  say  that  they  are  charm- 
ing, no  doubt,  but  shadowy  and  unreal,  an 
inferior  Earthly  Paradise  in  prose,  and  there  is 
quite  enough  of  the  real  Earthly  Paradise  in 
verse.  Well,  the  way  to  get  rid  of  these 
notions  is  to  read  the  romances  themselves ; 
and  it  is  a  very  easy  way.  Begin  with  The 
Wood  heyond  the  Worlds  and,  if  you  like 
romance  at  all,  you  will  have  finished  it  and 
started  on  another  before  you  have  asked 
yourself  whether  you  enjoy  it.  There  are 
some  people,  of  course,  who  do  not  like 
27 


Essays  on  Books 

romance  at  all,  just  as  there  are  some  who  do 
not  like  music  or  pictures  of  the  Madonna. 
They  can  be  interested  only  in  facts  familiar 
to  them,  and  they  cannot  believe  any  story 
that  might  not  be  told  as  news  in  a  newspaper. 
But  if  these  complain  of  the  prose  romances 
that  they  are  vague  or  unsubstantial,  they 
misstate  the  reason  why  they  dislike  them.  It 
is  true  that  Morris  does  not  tell  us  when  or 
where  his  stories  happened,  but  he  knows 
clearly  and  fully  what  happened  in  them,  and 
he  tells  it  with  the  precision  of  his  knowledge. 
He  never  seems  to  be  inventing,  but  always  to 
be  relating,  and  therefore  it  does  not  matter 
that  he  relates  what  may  never  have  happened. 
Given  the  world  of  his  romance,  we  know  that 
it  would  have  happened  as  he  tells  it. 

A  story,  whatever  kind  of  world  it  may  be 
in,  is,  like  the  form  of  music,  either  a  natural 
growth  of  the  author''s  mind  or  a  device ;  it  is 
the  result  of  his  experience  or  of  his  desire  to 
tell  a  story.  Now  it  is  commonly  supposed 
that  Morris's  romances  are  the  result  of  his 
desire  to  tell  a  story,  or  even  of  his  desire  to 
write  in  a  certain  style  full  of  obsolete  words 
and  constructions.  But  Morris  was  a  great 
man,  and  great  men,  whatever  mistakes  they 
may  make,  do  not  write  for  such  reasons.  It 
28 


Prose  Romances  of  William  Morris 

is  true  that  in  his  prose  romances  he  stole  a 
holiday  from  his  Socialism,  but  he  did  not 
change  himself  into  a  dilettante  when  he  did 
that.  The  world  of  which  he  wrote,  unlike 
the  world  in  which  he  lived,  was  not  one  that 
he  wished  to  reform ;  but  neither  was  it,  as 
some  have  absurdly  called  it,  a  decorative 
world.  Literature  cannot  be  decorative,  for  it 
is  not  a  means  of  decoration ;  and  to  call  it 
that,  whether  in  praise  or  blame,  is  to  use 
a  false  analogy.  Probably  those  who  call 
Morris's  romances  decorative  mean  that  the 
characters  in  them  are  faintly  drawn  and  move 
languidly  against  a  background  of  pretty 
detail.  If  so,  they  have  found  in  these 
romances  what  they  expected  to  find,  not  what 
is  there.  For  the  romances  are  full  of  passion 
and  trouble  and  delight  and  sin ;  and,  although 
their  world  is  not  ours,  it  is  a  world  in  which 
Morris*'s  own  experience  of  life  tells — indeed, 
it  seems  to  be  created  entirely  out  of  his 
experience.  Perhaps  the  true  reason  why 
great  artists  turn  to  ideal  art  is  to  be  found  in 
the  proper  meaning  of  the  word  "  ideal."  It 
is  not  that  they  would  empty  their  creation  of 
all  that  is  not  beautiful  in  reality,  but  that 
they  would  make  it  all  out  of  their  own 
experience.  Realism  is  a  hindrance  to  them 
29 


Essays  on  Books 

because  it  implies  a  mass  of  routine  and  detail 
which  exists  in  reality  but  is  not  part  of  their 
experience  of  it.  When  Michelangelo  painted 
"  The  Creation  of  Adam  "  he  gave  us,  from  his 
own  experience  of  life,  his  notion  of  what  life 
means  to  man.  Clothes  were  not  part  of  that 
meaning,  nor  were  any  circumstances  of  time 
and  place ;  his  Adam  belongs  to  no  age,  and 
the  ground  on  which  he  lies  is  of  no  season  or 
country.  Everything  in  the  picture  is  created 
to  express  his  idea  and  through  it  his  experi- 
ence. Michelangelo  there  was  able  to  escape 
from  irrelevant  circumstance  by  means  of  his 
subject ;  and  Morris  uses  romance  for  the  same 
purpose.  Unlike  Michelangelo,  he  charges  his 
romance  with  a  great  deal  of  circumstance, 
such  as  landscape  and  the  handiwork  of  man  ; 
but  all  this  he  creates  instead  of  copying  it ; 
and  it  is  all  there,  not  to  make  his  romance 
like  reality,  but  to  express  his  own  sense  of 
values.  Above  all,  it  is  not  there  for  the  sake 
of  prettiness.  Morris  may  have  hated  certain 
realities,  but  he  did  not  fear  them  ;  and  he  did 
not  turn  to  romance  because  he  wished  to 
persuade  himself  or  anyone  else  that  it  was 
reality ;  he  turned  to  it  because  he  was  able  to 
express  his  own  sense  of  reality  most  clearly 
in  it. 

30 


Prose  Romances  of  William  Morris 
II 

I  do  not  know  how  he  made  his  stories ; 
whether  he  invented  them  before  he  began 
to  write,  or  whether  they  grew  as  he  was 
writing.  Probably  they  grew,  for  they  read 
as  if  they  were  old  stories,  yet  they  are 
original  and  not  like  any  old  stories  that  we 
know.  In  all  of  them  we  feel  the  working  of 
his  mind,  with  his  clear  sense  of  the  values  of 
life  and  his  wonder  both  at  its  beauty  and  at 
the  mystery  of  its  evil.  There  is  magic  in 
these  stories,  but  it  is  not  there  to  make  them 
exciting,  nor  through  any  feeble  attempt  to 
believe  in  something  incredible.  We  know 
that  Morris  did  not  believe  in  magic  in  this 
world ;  but  in  that  world  of  his  creation  it 
seems  to  be  equivalent  to  the  mystery  of  evil  in 
this.  Evil,  in  this  life,  always  seemed  to  him 
a  malign  enchantment ;  he  could  see  far  into 
the  rational  explanation  of  good  things,  but 
not  of  bad ;  he  could  understand  imperfection, 
but  not  perversity.  And  his  enchantresses  in 
The  Wood  beyond  the  World  and  The  Water 
of  the  Wondrous  Isles  are  alive  with  this 
mystery  of  evil,  with  luxury  and  cruelty  and 
the  love  of  power,  so  that  the  power  which 
they  exercise  seems  to  be  evil  itself,  causeless, 
31 


Essays  on  Books 

irrational,  and  ruinous,  like  evil  in  this  wor'd 
as  he  saw  it.  The  enchantress  in  The  Wood 
beyond  the  World  destroys  herself  like  evil, 
tempted  to  her  death  by  enchantment,  having 
stabbed  one  of  her  lovers  who  has  taken  the 
form  of  another. 

But  the  Lady  drew  him  toward  her,  and 
snatched  the  clothes  from  off  his  shoulders 
and  breast  and  fell  a-gibbering  sounds  mostly 
without  meaning,  but  broken  here  and  there 
with  words.  Then  I  heard  her  say :  "  I  shall 
forget ;  I  shall  forget ;  and  the  new  days  shall 
come."  Then  there  was  silence  of  her  for  a 
little,  and  thereafter  she  cried  out  in  a  terrible 
voice  :  "  O  no,  no,  no  !  I  cannot  forget ;  I 
cannot  forget " ;  and  she  raised  a  great  wailing 
cry  that  filled  all  the  night  with  horror  (didst 
thou  not  hear  it?),  and  caught  up  the  knife 
from  the  bed  and  thrust  it  into  her  breast, 
and  fell  down  a  dead  heap  over  the  bed  and 
on  to  the  man  whom  she  had  slain. 

But  one  can  do  no  justice  to  these  stories 
by  quoting  passages  from  them,  for  their  life 
is  in  their  movement  and  their  effect  is  cumu- 
lative. What  Morris  tells  sets  the  mind  work- 
ing so  that  it  imagines  things  more  wonderful 
than  those  which  are  told.  The  story  is 
listened  to  breathlessly ;  and  at  the  end  the 
whole  effect  of  it  gathers  upon  the  memory 
32 


Prose  Romances  of  William  Morris 

as,'  if  it  were  single  and  instantaneous.  But  it 
is  worth  quoting  a  passage  to  show  how  little 
Morris's  style  resembles  the  common  idea  of 
it.  That  idea  is  based  upon  a  few  sentences 
which  we  wish  he  had  written  otherwise, 
because  they  serve  as  an  excuse  for  not  reading 
him.  "  Whilom,  as  tells  the  tale,  was  a  walled 
Cheaping-town  hight  Utterhay.''  So  TJte 
Water  of  the  Wondrous  Isles  begins,  and 
people  think  that,  because  it  begins  so,  it  must 
be  a  mere  archaistic  exercise.  We  wish  that 
he  had  not  used  obsolete  words,  since  they  dis- 
tract the  reader's  attention  from  the  sense, 
but  he  did  not  use  them  because  his  sense  was 
poor.  Those  vices  of  style  which  are  fatal  are 
also  vices  of  matter,  and  Morris  has  not  these. 
His  style  is  easier  to  understand  than  that  of 
most  modern  novelists,  it  is  the  style  of  a 
writer  who  forgets  himself  in  his  story  and 
who  forces  neither  beauty  nor  cleverness  upon 
us.  It  rises  and  falls  with  the  matter,  but 
even  where  the  matter  is  mere  explanation  it 
is  not  dull  or  ugly. 

Ill 

These    romances    are    remarkable,    not    for 
their  remote  and  tranquil  beauty,  but  for  their 
c  33 


Essays  on  Books 

vividness  and  precision.  Morris,  like  Coleridge 
in  The  Ancient  Mariner^  is  a  realist  of  imagined 
things.  He  produces  an  illusion  by  showing 
us  what  we  have  never  seen,  not  by  reminding 
us  of  what  we  have  seen.  The  Well  at  the 
World's  End  is  a  mediaeval  romance,  but  unlike 
other  mediaeval  romances  in  that  it  seems  to 
be  told  by  a  man  who  has  lived  in  the  Middle 
Ages.  Scott,  in  Ivanhoe  or  TTie  Talisman^ 
insists  upon  strange  and  picturesque  detail. 
He  gives  us  stage  scenery,  and  his  characters, 
when  they  are  not  merely  modern,  act  up  to 
it.  But  Morris  takes  the  Middle  Ages  as  a 
matter  of  course  ;  for  him  they  are  not  scenery 
or  a  background,  but  the  world  in  which  his 
characters  live  and  move,  and  the  characters 
do  not  act  their  parts  but  are  themselves. 
Nor  does  he  tell  us  anything  to  remind  us  that 
we  are  in  the  Middle  Ages ;  the  details  are 
there  for  the  part  they  play  in  the  story,  they 
are  details  that  one  man  of  the  time  might 
have  told  to  another,  not  as  being  strange, 
but  as  matters  of  common  interest.  Nor  does 
he  put  his  story  in  the  Middle  Ages  be- 
cause it  is  a  beautiful  time  to  him  in  which 
all  goes  well.  He  loves  it,  but  not  because  he 
thinks  of  it  as  an  earthly  paradise.  His  sense 
of  evil  and  oppression  is  just  as  strong  when 
34 


Prose  Romances  of  William  Morris 

he  writes  of  the  Burgh  of  the  Four  Friths 
as  when  he  writes  of  modern  London.  The 
people  of  the  Burgh  are  a  kind  of  mediaeval 
Spartans,  who  oppress  all  their  neighbours  and 
steal  their  women.  They  talk  to  a  stranger 
in  an  inn  about  these  women,  who  are  fairer 
than  their  own,  and  one  of  them  says  that 
they  are  "good  websters,  and,  lacking  them, 
figured  cloth  of  silk  would  be  far-fetched  and 
dear-bought  here.""  Thereupon  a  youth  laughs 
at  him  and  says : — 

Fair  sirs,  ye  are  speaking  like  hypocrites, 
and  as  if  your  lawful  wives  were  here  to  hearken 
to  you ;  whereas  ye  know  well  how  goodly 
these  thralls  be,  and  that  many  of  them  can 
be  kind  enough  withal ;  and  ye  would  think 
yourselves  but  ill  bestead  if  ye  might  not 
cheapen  such  jewels  for  your  money.  Which 
of  you  will  go  to  the  Cross  next  Saturday  and 
there  bring  him  a  fairer  wife  than  he  can  wed 
out  of  our  lineages  ?  and  a  wife  withal  of  whose 
humours  he  need  take  no  more  account  than 
of  the  dullness  of  his  hound  or  the  skittish 
temper  of  his  mare,  so  long  as  the  thong 
smarts  and  the  twigs  sting. 

Here  Morris  shows  us,  the  more  vividly  because 
casually,  the  particular  kind  of  oppression  that 
he  most  hated  in  all  ages,  the  oppression 
which  treats  human  beings  as  if  they  were  not 
35 


Essays  on  Books 

human  ;  and  he  shows  us,  too,  how  this  oppres- 
sion, even  in  a  strong  military  people,  taints 
the  whole  of  society  and  makes  it  ugly  and 
loveless  and  luxurious.  He  was  not  writing  a 
social  tract,  but  expressing  his  own  sense  of 
values  in  a  story ;  and  it  is  that  which  makes 
his  stories  real  to  him  and  to  his  readers. 
Indeed,  no  romiincer  was  ever  less  allured  by 
the  common  elements  of  mediaeval  romance ; 
he  is  not  the  fashionable  novelist  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  interested  in  knights  on  horse- 
back caracoling  in  search  of  adventure. 
Rather  he  loved  the  Middle  Ages  because  they 
were  expressive  both  of  good  and  of  evil, 
because  both  were  plain  to  see  in  them,  like 
the  saints  and  devils  of  a  Gothic  church. 
What  troubled  him  about  our  own  time  was 
its  inexpressive  complexity,  its  evil  that  seemed 
to  be  causeless,  its  good  that  produced  evil 
results.  Looking  back  on  the  Middle  Ages, 
from  a  distance  but  with  vast  knowledge  and 
still  greater  divination,  he  saw  good  and  evil 
clearly  opposed  in  them ;  and  in  his  romances 
he  could  bring  them  to  an  issue  and  so  for  a 
while  escape  from  his  unsatisfied  longing  to 
bring  them  to  an  issue  here  and  now.  In 
The  Roots  of'  the  Mountains  there  is  war 
between  the  Goths,  the  people  who  were  the 
36 


Prose  Romances  of  William  Morris 

hope  of  Europe,  and  the  Huns,  a  mere  force  of 
barbarism  and  cruelty  and  destruction.  To 
him  that  war  is  the  prelude  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  and  he  tells  of  the  victory  of  the  Goths 
with  the  delight  of  one  who  knows  what  it 
means  for  the  future.  As  we  read,  it  seems  to 
us,  not  a  mere  tale  of  fighting,  but  history 
told  by  one  who  took  part  in  it  yet  had  fore- 
knowledge of  its  meaning. 

As  for  the  people  of  the  romances,  they  are 
not  portraits,  but  rather  figures  in  a  large 
composition  ;  yet  they  are  never  lay  figures. 
Morris  knew  too  well  the  kind  of  man  and 
woman  he  liked  not  to  draw  them  firmly. 
Now  and  again  he  surprises  us  by  his  subtlety 
though  he  never  insists  upon  it,  for  his  own 
mind  was  subtle.  He  had  a  turn  for  intro- 
spection which  was  checked  by  his  incessant 
labours,  but  which  taught  him  a  great  deal 
about  other  men's  minds.  This  knowledge  is 
usually  rather  implied  than  displayed,  like  so 
much  of  his  knowledge ;  he  is  not  an  osten- 
tatious anatomist  of  the  mind,  but  every  stroke 
of  character  is  firm  and  in  its  right  place. 
His  heroes  and  heroines  are  not  insipidly  good, 
but  we  know  that  we  should  like  them  if  we 
could  meet  them,  and  we  feel  that  there  is 
much  more  to  be  known  about  them  than  he 
37 


Essays  on  Books 

tells  us.  Indeed,  we  feel  that  about  everything 
in  the  romances ;  he  has  created  a  world  in 
them  and  not  merely  told  a  story,  and  there 
is  that  world  of  wonder  and  beauty  and  terror 
waiting  to  be  enjoyed  by  thousands  where  it  is 
now  only  enjoyed  by  tens. 


38 


Dickens    no       ^i>       <?•       '<^       o       '^ 

( Written  for  the  Centenary  of  his  birth) 

THE  fourth  part  of  Dickens's  Holiday 
Romance  tells  of  a  country  in  which 
children  and  grown-ups  change  places.  The 
children  rule  and  the  grown-ups  have  to  obey 
them.  The  point  of  the  story  is  that  the 
grown-ups  are  described  as  if  they  were 
children,  and  being  so  described  they  appear 
more  troublesome  and  less  attractive  than  real 
children.  There  is  a  party  of  grown-ups  at  which 

four  tiresome,  fat  boys  would  stand  in  the 
doorway  and  talk  about  the  newspapers,  till 
Mrs.  Alicumpaine  [the  child  who  gives  the 
party]  went  to  them  and  said,  "  My  dears,  I 
really  cannot  allow  you  to  prevent  people  from 
coming  in.  I  shall  be  truly  sorry  to  do  it ;  but 
if  you  put  yourselves  in  everybody's  way  I 
must  positively  send  you  home."  One  boy, 
with  a  beard  and  a  large  white  waistcoat,  who 
stood  straddling  on  the  hearthrug  warming  his 
coat-tails,  was  sent  home.  "  Highly  incorrect, 
my  dear,"  said  Mrs.  Alicumpaine,  handing  him 
out  of  the  room,  "  and  I  cannot  permit  it." 

In  this  little  tale  Dickens  only  does  openly  and 
39 


Essays  on  Books 

consciously  what  he  does,  without  knowing  or 
without  confessing  it,  in  the  best  part  of  all  his 
books.  That  boy  with  a  beard  and  a  large  white 
waistcoat,  who  stood  straddling  on  the  hearth- 
rug, is  seen  as  Dickens  saw  every  one  whom  he 
did  see,  whether  young  or  old,  good  or  bad, 
male  or  female.  His  own  life  was  not  divided 
into  periods  of  childhood,  youth,  and  middle 
age ;  his  experience  was  always  of  the  same  kind. 
People  and  things  affected  him  to  the  last  just 
as  they  had  affected  him  when  he  first  began 
to  take  notice ;  and  since  there  were  no 
divisions  in  his  own  life,  he  took  no  account  of 
such  divisions  in  the  lives  of  others.  He  says, 
somewhere,  that  feelings  which  we  think 
serious  in  a  man  seem  to  us  comical  in  a  boy ; 
but  he  himself  reversed  the  process.  Children 
are  nearly  always  serious  to  him.  It  is  men 
who  seem  to  him  absurd,  when  they  conceal 
their  childishness  behind  beards  and  large 
white  waistcoats.  He  loved  those  who,  like 
himself,  remained  children  all  their  lives  ;  but 
the  others  seemed  to  him  to  be  playing  some 
kind  of  stupid  game ;  and,  if  he  could,  he 
would  have  sent  them  all  to  bed. 

What  troubled  him  most  in  life  was  the  fact 
that  the  pompous  boys  in  beards  and  white 
waistcoats  had  all  the  power  and  used  it  to 
40 


Dickens 

oppress  the  true  children,  young  and  old.     He 
saw  the  Bumbles  and  Gradgrinds  making  life 
unpleasant  for  the  poor,  just  as  stupid  grown- 
ups had  made  life  unpleasant  for  him  when  he 
was  a  child.     His    own   childish  memory  still 
smarts  in  his  treatment  of  a  mere    tease  like 
Pumblechook,  against  whom  he  pays  off  old 
scores  as  if  they  were  scores  of  yesterday  ;  and 
he  hates  Bumble  as  a  boy  might  hate  a  bully 
at  school.     Thus,  while  he  has  great  pity  for 
those  whom  he  loves  and  understands,  he  may 
seem  merciless  to  those  whom  he  does  not ;  and 
there  is  a  nursery  morality  in  his  punishments. 
There  are  two  kinds  of  people  in  his  books, 
the  good  and  the  bad,  and  at  the  end  he  sees 
_  that  both  get  their  deserts ;    but  there  is  no 
real  cruelty  in  his  heaviest  retributions.     His 
villains  are  bundled  off  to  gaol  like  guys  to  the 
bonfire,  because  it  is  the  proper  place  for  them. 
Fagin  himself  is  half  a  guy,  though  real  enough 
to    be    terrifying    to    a    child ;    and    we    feel 
that    Dickens   has    seen   him  as    a   frightened 
chil(i  might  see  him.     So  it  is  with  Mr.  Carker 
and  even  Madame  Defarge ;  indeed,  she  talks 
as  if  she  were  talking  to  children  with  the  aim 
of  frightening  them. 

"You  work    hard,  Madame,"   said    a   man 
near  her. 

41 


Essays  on  Books 

"  Yes,"  answered  Madame  Defarge.  "  I 
have  a  good  deal  to  do." 

"  What  do  you  make,  Madame  ?  " 

"  Many  things." 

"  For  instance " 

"For  instance,"  returned  Madame  Defarge 
composedly,  "  shrouds." 

It  reminds  one  of  the  Wolf  in  Red  Riding- 
Hood,  "  All  the  better  to  eat  you  with,  my 
dear." 

Dickens's  memory  must  have  been  stored 
with  figures  that  had  frightened  him  in  his 
childhood,  and  at  the  same  time  excited  his 
curiosity.  His  books  are  full  of  people  vivid 
and  sinister,  who  talk  more  or  less  incompre- 
hensibly, who  seem  to  have  a  secret  way  of  life 
of  their  own  and  a  nature,  half  elfish  or  devilish, 
half  absurdly  mechanical.  That  is  how  ugly 
people  absorbed  in  their  own  concerns  often 
appear  to  an  observant  child,  who  cannot  from 
their  speech  discover  what  they  are  about,  and 
who  thinks,  therefore,  that  it  must  be  some 
wicked  game  played  for  its  own  sake.  A  child 
has  no  idea  of  business  or  the  struggle  for  life ; 
it  can  be  serious  enough,  but  always  over  a 
game ;  and  it  estimates  people  by  the  kind  of 
game  they  seem  to  be  playing  and  by  the 
manner  in  which  they  play  it.  So  Dickens 
42 


Dickens 

saw  all  the  different  activities  of  men  as  games, 
good  and  bad.  Wemmick,  at  the  office,  played 
a  poor  game ;  at  home,  with  his  castle  and 
drawbridge  and  aged  parent,  he  played  a  good 
one.  Whenever  Dickens  chose  he  could  forget 
all  that  he  knew  by  experience  about  the 
struggle  for  life  and  fall  into  his  natural 
childish  observation  of  men's  doings,  describing 
them  as  if  he  did  not  know  their  object,  with 
extreme  vividness  but  with  a  constant  sense  of 
the  absurdity  of  actions  and  words  which  seem 
mechanical  because  they  are  unintelligible.  That 
was  his  satiric  method,  which  he  applied  to 
officials,  to  people  of  fashion,  to  politicians, 
to  all  important  persons.  Every  one  who  fell 
into  routine,  who  seemed  to  act  inexpressively 
and  with  no  sense  of  the  fun  of  life,  was  turned 
by  him  into  a  marionette.  And  in  this  world 
of  marionettes,  made  vivid  and  strange  by 
their  isolation  from  the  customary  background 
of  reason  and  purpose,  animals  and  objects  by 
way  of  compensation  became  more  human,  as 
they  appear  to  the  intense  curiosity  of  a  child. 
"  The  blackbeetles  .  .  .  groped  about  the 
hearth  in  a  ponderous,  elderly  way,  as  if  they 
were  shortsighted  and  hard  of  hearing,  and 
not  on  terms  with  one  another."  He  thinks  of 
them,  too,  as  if  they  were  playing  a  game,  the 
43 


Essays  on  Books 

game  of  pretending  to  be  human  beings,  and 
he  laughs  at  them  for  the  serious  manner  in 
which  they  play  it. 

Naturally,  with  this  method,  he  is  better  at 
invention  than  at  construction.  He  took  great 
pains  with  his  plots,  as  with  everything ;  but 
they  often  seem  a  mere  distraction  from  his 
proper  business.  They  provide  motives  for 
the  behaviour  of  his  vivid  figures,  motives 
which  seem  to  us  inadequate,  as  indeed  they 
are,  because  they  are  manufactured,  not  ob- 
served like  the  figures  themselves.  For 
Dickens  himself  there  was  a  perpetual  mystery 
ill  human  life,  which  he  could  enjoy  without 
wishing  to  explain  it.  He  was  not  a  scientific 
no\'elist,  and  he  only  tried  to  be  one  to  satisfy 
the  supposed  demands  of  his  public.  His 
natural  way  of  telling  a  story  was  primitive : 
it  was  to  relate  the  doings  of  men  without 
troubling  about  their  motives  ;  and  this  he  did 
so  well  that  we  believe  in  his  characters  with- 
out understanding  them  and  without  seeing 
any  likeness  in  them  to  ourselves.  Many  of 
them  have  become  mythical,  and  we  are  merely 
irritated  when  Dickens  himself  tries  to 
rationalize  his  myths,  to  manufacture  motives 
where  he  did  not  see  them,  as  even  Shake- 
speare manufactured  motives  for  lago  which 
44 


Dickens 

are  inadequate  to  explain  him.  Dickens's 
business  is  creation,  not  analysis,  and  he 
creates  so  profusely  that  his  creatures  often 
become  an  unmanageable  mob  who  will  not  be 
governed  by  his  plot.  What  has  Mrs.  Gamp 
to  do  with  the  plot  of  Martin  Chuzzlewit  or 
with  the  world  of  duty  and  business  with 
which  he  makes  a  feeble  effort  to  connect  her  ? 
If  we  could  for  a  moment  consider  the  motives 
of  her  conduct,  she  would  dwindle  into  a 
wicked  old  woman  ;  but  Dickens  had  seen  her 
and  drawn  her  without  a  thought  of  her 
motives.  She  has  nothing  to  do  with  right 
and  wrong,  and  the  fact  that  she  is  a  nurse 
is  a  mere  pretext  for  her  introduction.  All 
we  ask  of  her  is  that  she  shall  continue  to  talk  ; 
and  we  follow  her  through  the  book  as  we 
follow  a  great  comic  actor  when  he  gags  upon 
the  stage.  Both  may  interfere  with  the  plot, 
but,  if  they  do,  so  much  the  worse  for  it. 
When  Falstaff  enters,  the  history  of  England 
becomes  a  mere  background  to  him  ;  and  when 
Mrs.  Gamp  is  talking,  Martin  Chuzzlewit  is 
a  super. 

There  is  only  one  other  English  novelist  who 
for  limitations  and  for  intensity  can  be  com- 
pared with  Dickens — namely,  Charlotte  Bronte  ; 
and  there  is  a  similar  cause  for  the  limitations 
45 


Essays  on  Books 

and  the  intensity  of  both.  For  as  Dickens  is 
the  child  among  novelists,  Charlotte  Bronte 
is  the  girl.  They  see  very  differently,  but  the 
eyes  of  both  are  not  dulled  by  experience 
and  their  feelings  not  blunted  by  theory. 
They  do  not  find  in  life  what  they  expect  to 
find  in  it,  and  therefore  their  books  are  full 
of  surprises  for  us.  But  experience  is  a  word 
that  may  be  used  in  different  senses.  People 
have  wondered  that  Charlotte  Bronte  should 
have  written  so  well  with  so  little  of  it ;  they 
forget  that  it  was  a  sharp  experience  for  her 
to  meet  a  new  person  or  to  enter  a  room  for 
the  first  time.  We  cannot  tell  whether  she 
would  have  kept  this  eagerness  of  perception 
if  she  had  lived ;  but  Dickens  kept  it  all  his 
life,  and  he  is  her  only  rival  in  describing 
everything  as  if  he  had  never  seen  anything 
like  it  before.  The  difference  between  them 
is  a  difference  both  of  sex  and  of  age.  She  is 
older  than  he  is,  for  there  is  nothing  childlike 
about  her.  Both  are  magnificently  unworldly  ; 
but  Dickens  went  through  the  world  with  a 
child's  detachment,  watching  it  and  wondering 
at  it,  working  too  hard,  enjoying  himself  too 
much,  but  never  turning  his  game  into  a 
business.  Charlotte  Bronte  was  not  detached 
from  life,  but  caught  into  it  by  newborn 
46 


Dickens 

passions  and  instincts.  She  had  reached  the 
age  of  love,  and  the  world  was  as  full  of 
adventures  for  her  as  it  was  full  of  men.  For 
Dickens,  being  still  a  child,  it  was  as  full  of 
adventures  as  of  things.  Adult  love  to  him 
is  only  a  tiresome  business  that  has  to  be 
written  about  because  his  readers,  being  grown 
up,  want  it.  For  Charlotte  Bronte  it  is  the 
one  thing  that  gives  meaning  and  a  fearful 
glory  to  life.  But  with  this  difference  between 
them  they  are  alike  in  this  and  unlike  other 
great  novelists,  that  they  always  seem  to  write 
about  the  present,  not  the  past.  Nothing  that 
they  tell  of  is  mellowed  or  dimmed  by  the 
lapse  of  time  ;  as  we  read  them  we  have  the 
same  illusion  of  something  that  has  just 
happened,  the  same  conviction  of  reality,  un- 
supported by  reason  and  defiant  of  it,  which 
comes  to  us  when  we  remember  in  the  morning 
a  dream  of  last  night.  Other  writers  have  to 
satisfy  our  sense  of  probability ;  their  fiction 
must  be  less  strange  than  truth  because  they 
must  persuade  us  that  it  is  true ;  but  Dickens 
and  Charlotte  Bronte  can  persuade  us  of  any- 
thing by  their  mere  power  of  representation. 
As  we  read  them  we  see  with  their  eyes  and 
pass  through  their  experiences.  It  may  be 
all  subjective,  as  the  philosophers  say ;  but  so 
47 


Essays  on  Books 

is  a  dream,  and  that  is  often  more  vivid  than 
objective  realities. 

Charlotte  Bronte  has  this  one  advantage 
over  Dickens,  that  love  for  her  is  a  pre- 
dominating interest  to  which  all  other  interests 
are  subordinate.  So  she  can  make  a  story  out 
of  love,  coherent  and  of  natural  growth,  with 
all  her  own  rebellions  against  it  and  mis- 
understandings of  it,  with  the  conflict  between 
it  and  the  sense  of  duty,  religion,  conventions, 
the  struggle  for  life.  Her  very  situation  is  so 
interesting  that  it  makes  a  novel  by  itself. 
For  her,  the  passionate  girl  of  genius  trained 
in  a  country  parsonage,  life  is  all  a  voyage  of 
discovery  and  every  incident  an  adventure. 
The  contact  between  her  mind  and  the  world 
is  so  sharp  that  sparks  are  struck  from  it  every 
moment.  As  we  read  her  books  we  think  only 
of  her ;  we  do  not  see  her  characters  as  they 
are,  but  feel  them  as  she  felt  them.  Dickens 
is  not  thus  the  centre  of  his  books,  nor  does 
love  make  a  plot  for  him.  Indeed,  love,  as  he 
naturally  represents  it,  is  only  a  childish 
wistfulness  soon  forgotten  in  the  struggle  of 
life.  It  is  almost  the  only  thing  that  he  seems 
to  describe  as  a  faint  memory,  calling  it  by 
an  effort  out  of  the  past  as  other  writers 
call  up  their  childhood.  But  he  has  this 
48 


Dickens 

advantage  over  Charlotte  Bronte,  that  his 
interests  are  far  more  diverse  than  hers.  Like 
a  child,  he  can  forget  himself  in  the  spectacle 
of  life.  She  judges  everything — and  rather 
harshly — except  passion.  His  natural  inclina- 
tion is  to  judge  nothing  and  to  enjoy  every- 
thing, even  the  bores  and  the  humbugs.  The 
world  of  humour  is  closed  to  her  and  the 
world  of  passion  to  him.  There  are  distressing 
passages  in  the  works  of  both  :  in  hers  when 
she  thinks  it  necessary  for  her  characters  to 
be  funny  ;  in  his  when  his  characters  try  to 
make  love  or  talk  about  love  like  grown-up 
people.  And  it  is  a  curious  fact  that  her  fun 
and  his  sentiment  read  very  much  alike ;  there 
is  the  same  preposterous  artificiality  in  both, 
the  same  instant  loss  of  all  those  great  qualities 
of  style  whicli  elsewhere  they  exhibit  so  con- 
stantly. 

There  used  to  be  a  notion,  founded  on  his 
sentimental  failures,  that  Dickens  was  an 
illiterate  vulgarian  of  genius,  a  bad  and  un- 
scrupulous writer  who  interests  the  refined 
only  because  he  tells  them  of  vulgar  people  like 
himself  whom  they  have  never  met.  But  no  one 
who  has  ever  tried  to  write  can  read  a  chapter 
of  him  without  seeing  that  he  was  master  of 
a  sound  and  even  classical  prose  style.  It  is  true 
D  49 


fissays  on  Books 


that  he  had  not  what  we  call  a  classical  edu- 
cation ;  but  he  was  as  well  trained  for  writing 
English  novels  as  ^Eschylus  for  writing  Greek 
plays.  His  teachers  were  Fielding,  Smollett, 
and  Defoe ;  and  he  had  learned  from  them 
thoroughly.  If  he  felt  and  saw  like  a  child, 
he  wrote  like  a  man,  with  a  masculine  weight 
and  clearness  and  balance.  There  is  no 
hysteria  in  his  pamphlets,  but  moderation  and 
common  sense,  and  anger  only  when  it  is  just. 
He  was  not  naturally  rhetorical  or  sentimental, 
but  supplied  both  rhetoric  and  sentiment  out 
of  conscientious  good-nature.  They  were 
sweetmeats  that  he  did  not  like  himself,  but 
gave  to  his  grown-up  readers  because  they 
clamoured  for  them.  When  we  call  him  a 
child  we  do  not  impute  to  him  any  weakness 
of  intellect  or  lack  of  judgment;  he  was 
limited  only  in  his  range  of  emotions  and  in 
his  appreciation  of  adult  motives ;  and  even 
that  limitation  was  the  result,  perhaps,  of  his 
extreme  keenness  of  perception.  We  cannot 
believe  that  he  was  incapable  of  any  kind  of 
emotion  or  understanding  whatever ;  but  his 
mind  was  so  busy  with  the  material  provided 
for  it  by  his  eyes  and  ears  that  it  had  no 
leisure  to  occupy  itself  with  its  own  workings  , 
or  to  entertain  a  lasting  passion. 
50 


Dickens 

Yet  the  dazzling  spectacle  of  life  did  inspire 
him  with  one  lasting  passion — the  passion  of 
pity ;  and  it  was  that  which  gave  music  to 
his  laughter  and  weight  to  his  thought.  All 
his  ideas  were  sound ;  he  loved  the  essential 
virtues  and  hated  the  essential  vices.  If  life 
could  be  as  he  wished  it  to  be,  it  would  be 
neither  dull  nor  cruel ;  there  would  be  room 
in  it  both  for  the  weak  and  for  the  strong, 
for  the  city  clerk  and  the  man  of  genius.  We 
can  best  understand  a  great  writer  by  noticing 
what  he  does  best ;  and  Dickens''s  masterpiece 
is  not  Mrs.  Gamp,  nor  even  Peggotty  or  Joe 
Gargery,  but  the  convict  Abel  Magwitch.  It 
was  not  fun  but  pity  that  lifted  his  genius  to 
its  greatest  height,  and  a  pity  as  reasonable 
as  justice.  There  is  no  description  of  his  so 
sharp  and  so  full  of  meaning  as  the  description 
of  Magwitch  as  Pip  first  saw  him  on  his 
return : — 

In  all  his  ways  of  sitting  and  standing,  and 
eating  and  drinking — of  brooding  about,  in  a 
high-shouldered,  reluctant  style — of  taking  out 
his  great  horn-handled  jack-knife  and  wiping  it 
on  his  legs  and  cutting  his  food — of  lifting 
light  glasses  and  cups  to  his  lips,  as  if  they 
were  clumsy  pannikins — of  chopping  a  wedge 
off'  his  bread,  and  soaking  up  with  it  the  last 
fragments  of  gravy  round  and  round  his  plate, 

51 


Essays  on  Books 

as  if  to  make  the  most  of  an  allowance,  and 
then  drying  his  fingers  on  it,  and  then 
swallowing  it — in  these  ways  and  a  thousand 
other  small  nameless  instances  arising  every 
minute  in  the  day,  there  was  Prisoner,  Felon, 
Bondsman,  plain  as  plain  could  be. 

In  that  description,  and  in  the  account  of 
the  process  by  which  Pip's  first  disgust  was 
changed  to  affection,  Dickens  is  no  longer  the 
marvellous  child  among  novelists  but  a  master 
among  those  masters  who  have  taught  pity 
to  the  world  out  of  their  own  hearts.  And 
his  pity  here  is  too  proud  and  too  sure  of  itself 
to  argue.  There  may  have  been  readers  when 
Great  Expectations  was  published  who  thought 
that  the  account  of  the  death  sentence  was  an 
appeal  to  sentiment,  that  it  was  only  a  proper 
protection  of  society  that  men  and  women 
should  be  hanged  by  scores  for  all  sorts  of 
offences,  and  in  particular  for  returning  to 
their  native  country  when  they  had  been  trans- 
ported for  life.  But  read  the  passage  now 
and  you  will  think  Dickens's  pity  wiser  than 
their  common  sense : — 

Penned  in  the  dock  .  .  .  were  the  two-and- 

thirty   men  and  women ;    some  defiant,   some 

stricken  with  terror,  some  sobbing  and  weeping, 

some  covering  their  faces,  some  staring  gloomily 

52 


Dickens 

about.  There  had  been  shrieks  from  among 
the  women  convicts,  but  they  had  been  stilled, 
and  a  hush  had  succeeded.  The  sheriffs  with 
their  great  chains  and  nosegays,  other  civic 
gewgaws  and  monsters,  criers,  ushers,  a  great 
gallery  full  of  people  —  a  large  theatrical 
audience — looked  on,  as  the  two-and-thirty 
and  the  Judge  were  solemnly  confronted. 

Then  follows  the  Judge's  address  to  Magwitch, 
with  its  reasons  why  he  deserved  to  die,  all 
based  upon  a  gross  ignorance  of  his  character 
and  motives.  In  the  person  of  that  Judge, 
Dickens  reveals  the  world  to  itself  with  an 
irony  more  quiet  and  more  deadly  than  laughter 
or  tears.  There  his  genius,  wise  in  its  childish- 
ness, spoke  with  the  voice  of  posterity ;  and 
it  seems  to  speak  now  as  if  he  were  living 
among  us  and  could  rebuke  us  too  for  our 
pompous  cruelties  and  could,  like  the  child 
that  he  was,  enjoy  the  praise  and  honour  we 
give  to  his  memory. 


53 


Algernon  Charles  Swinburne         o       o 

( Written  on  the  occasion  of  his  death) 

WHEN  a  great  poet  dies  it  is  natural 
and  right  that  we  should  think  only 
of  the  splendour  and  not  of  the  imperfection 
of  his  works.  While  he  is  with  us,  and  when 
we  have  grown  accustomed  to  his  presence 
among  us,  we  may  note  the  defects  of  his 
genius;  and  these  are  sure  to  be  judged  by 
the  unconscious  but  implacable  justice  of 
posterity.  At  the  moment  of  his  death  we 
must  feel  and  express  only  our  gratitude  for 
all  that  he  has  done  to  glorify  our  lives. 
Then,  for  a  while,  he  has  no  competitors  among 
the  living  or  the  dead.  The  thoughts  of  all 
lovers  of  poetry  are  fixed  upon  him,  as  the 
thoughts  of  a  family  are  fixed  upon  a  member 
of  it  who  has  just  passed  away. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  Algernon  Charles 
Swinburne  was  one  of  our  great  poets,  a  master 
of  his  art  who  said  immortal  things  and 
helped  to  make  the  history  of  the  human 
mind.  But  there  is  one  circumstance  that 
makes  his  death  peculiarly  moving  to  us.  He 
54 


Algernon  Charles  Swinburne 

was  the  last  of  the  giant  race  before  the  flood, 
the  latest  born  and  the  latest  to  survive  of  the 
great  romantic  poets  who  have  dominated  our 
literature  ever  since  the  first  songs  of  Blake 
rose  almost  unheard  so  long  ago.  The  death 
of  Swinburne  marks  the  close  of  an  heroic  age 
in  our  poetry,  as  the  death  of  Tintoret  marked 
the  close  of  an  heroic  age  in  Italian  art.  True, 
there  is  one  of  Swinburne's  great  companions 
who  still  survives ;  but  as  a  poet  Mr.  George 
Meredith  is  troubled  with  our  later  emotional 
scepticism.  He  is  in  date  a  romantic,  as 
Donne  was  an  Elizabethan ;  but,  like  Donne, 
he  has  always  been  in  revolt  against  the  poetry 
of  his  own  time  and  has  seemed  to  be  making 
experiments  towards  the  poetry  of  the  future. 
He  is,  as  it  were,  wandering  between  two  worlds, 
labouring  to  make  an  instrument  for  the  ex- 
pression of  ideas  still  too  new  to  be  expressed 
in  terms  of  beauty.  But  Swinburne  belonged 
altogether  to  a  world  of  poetry  that  has  died 
with  him.  In  literature  he  was  the  heir  of  all 
the  ages,  and  the  last  inheritor  of  a  great 
tradition.  There  are  some  great  men  who 
prepare  for  the  future  and  others  who  con- 
summate the  past.  He  was  one  of  these ; 
he  seems  to  have  been  born  with  the  ideas 
that  informed  all  his  poetry,  or  at  least  to 
55 


Essays  on  Books 

have  acquired  them  without  effort  or  question. 
There  was  never  any  emotional  scepticism  in 
him ;  he  had  never  to  persuade  himself  of  the 
value  of  what  he  loved  or  the  worthlessness  of 
what  he  hated.  No  poetry  has  less  argument 
than  his  or  less  prosaic  content.  About  the 
glories  of  life  he  was  an  extreme  dogmatist, 
and  his  one  aim  in  poetry  was  to  express 
them.  Thus  from  us,  with  our  emotional 
insecurity,  our  constant  questioning  of  the 
values  of  all  things,  he  is  as  far  re- 
moved as  Fra  Angelico ;  and  as  a  poet  he 
seems  to  have  the  unfair  advantage  of  the 
artists  of  the  age  of  faith.  It  makes  no 
difference  that  his  faith  sometimes  expressed 
itself  in  furious  denunciation ;  he  was  as 
eager  to  proclaim  his  disbeliefs  as  his  beliefs 
and  he  made  poetry  out  of  both.  Whatever  his 
supei'ficial  extravagances  or  perversities  may 
have  been,  he  knew  for  certain  what  he 
valued  in  life;  his  mind  was  fixed  and  his 
faith  unshaken. 

There  still  persists  a  notion  that  he  was  a 
morbid  poet.  In  his  youth  he  played  with 
morbidities,  as  boys  play  at  being  pirates ; 
but  they  never  tainted  his  mind  or  perverted 
his  sense  of  the  value  of  things.  They  were 
mere  experiments,  like  some  of  his  versification  ; 
56 


Algernon   Charles  Swinburne 

and.  like  all  men  of  enormous  and  restless 
energy,  he  was  fond  of  experiments  in  his  art. 
He  spoke  afterwards  of  certain  poems  in  the 
first  series  of  Poems  and  Ballads  as  the  sins 
of  his  youth.  In  the  Prelude  to  Son^s 
before  Sunrise  he  said  that  he  had  done  with 
them  and  was  now  to  treat  of  loftier  themes. 
We  have,  he  wrote, 

A  little  time  that  we  may  fill 

Or  with  such  good  works  or  such  ill 

As  loose  the  bonds  or  make  them  strong 
Wherein  all  manhood  suffers  wrong. 

By  rose-hung  river  and  light-foot  rill 
There    are  who  rest  not;  who  think  long 

Till  they  discern  as  from  a  hill 
At  the  sun's  hour  of  morning  song, 

Known  of  souls  only,  and  those  souls  free, 

The  sacred  spaces  of  the  sea. 

He  himself  was  never  in  doubt  which  works 
were  good  and  which  ill ;  and  his  eyes  were 
always  set  steadfastly  upon  the  sacred  spaces  of 
the  sea.  He  was  not  content  to  rest,  or  to 
prolong  the  emotions  and  the  music  of  his 
youth  past  their  proper  season.  There  is 
another  poem  of  his  in  which  he  says 
farewell  to  his  youth,  and  no  poet  has  ever 
said  it  more  bravely.  We  are  all  of  us,  when 
the  change  to  middle  age  comes,  afflicted  with 
a  sense  that  the  glory  of  life  has  passed  away ; 
57 


Essays  on  Books 

and  poets  are  sometimes  overpowered  by  that 
sense,  and  cry — "Out  of  the  day  and  night 
a  joy  hath  taken  flight."  Swinburne  got  a 
new  inspiration  from  the  courage  with  which 
he  faced  the  change.  In  the  Vision  of 
Spring  in  Winter  he  says : — 

The  morning  song  beneath  the  stars  that  fled 
With    twilight    through    the    moonless    mountain 

air, 
While   youth    with   burning    lips    and    wreathless 
hair 
Sang  toward  the  sun  that  was  to  crown  his  head, 
Rising ;  the  hopes  that  triumphed  and  fell  dead, 
The    sweet   swift   eyes    and   songs   of  hours   that 
were ; 
These  mayst  thou  not  give  back  for  ever  ;  these, 
As  at  the  sea's  heart  all  her  wrecks  lie  waste. 
Lie  deeper  than  the  sea ; 
But  flowers   thou   mayst,  and   winds,  and  hours   of 
ease, 
And  all  its  April  to  the  world  thou  mayst 
Give  back,  and  half  my  April  back  to  me. 

There  are  not  many  of  us  who  know  the 
hopes  that  triumph  and  fall  dead,  whose 
dreams  of  world-wide  fame  come  true  before 
they  are  thirty ;  and  it  is  difficult  for  us  to 
understand  that  a  poet  cannot  live  for  ever 
upon  dreams  come  true.  Swinburne  discovered 
that  by  experience;  he  faced  the  fact  and 
58 


Algernon  Charles  Swinburne 

determined  to  take  all  the  seasons  of  life  as 
they  came.  Therefore  he  did  not  outlive  his 
gift  or  his  faith,  but  learned  to  write  better  of 
death  than  he  had  ever  written  of  love  : — 

The  seal  of  sleep  set  on  thine  eyes  to-day 
Surely  can  seal  not  up  the  keen  swift  light 

That  lit  them  once  for  ever.     Night  can  slay 
None  save  the  children  of  the  womb  of  night. 

These  lines  are  from  the  elegy  on  John 
William  Inchbold,  which  was  published  in  the 
third  series  of  Poems  and  Ballads.  That 
poem  and  others  in  the  book  are  enough  to 
refute  the  common  belief  that  Swinburne's 
genius  spent  itself  in  his  youth,  that  after 
thirty  he  never  said  anything  that  he  had  not 
said  better  before.  The  belief  exists,  perhaps, 
because  there  are  no  signs  of  struggle  or  doubt 
or  transition  in  his  work.  He  always  had  the 
voice  of  youth  and  wrote  like  a  lover ;  but  as 
he  grew  older  he  wrote  less  and  less  of  the 
passions  of  youth  and  more  and  more  of  the 
matters  that  concern,  or  should  concern,  man- 
hood. He  was  never  a  great  tragic  poet,  hard 
as  he  tried  to  be  one,  for  his  genius  was  lyrical ; 
but  there  have  been  few  poets  who  could  treat 
a  tragic  theme  lyrically  as  well  as  he,  none 
who  has  revived  the  ballad  with  such  a  perfect 
59 


Essays  on  Books 

mixture  of   nature  and  art.     Here  is  a  verse 
from  A  Jacobite's  Exile  : — 

We'll  see  nae  mair  the  sea-banks  fair, 
And  the  sweet  grey  gleaming  sky, 

And  the  lordly  strand  of  Northumberland, 
And  the  goodly  towers  thereby  ; 

And  none  shall  know  but  the  winds  that  blow 
The  graves  wherein  we  lie. 

And   here    is    one,  even  more  poignant,  from 
A  Jacobite^s  Farewell : — 

O  lands  are  lost  and  life's  losing, 
And  what  were  they  to  gie? 

Fu'  mony  a  man  gives  all  he  can, 
But  nae  man  else  gives  ye. 

Critics  have  talked  of  Swinburne's  wonderful 
power  of  imitation,  as  if  he  were  a  mere  virtuoso 
producing  a  series  of  literary  exercises.  The 
best  answer  to  that  kind  of  criticism  is  to 
read  Before  the  Beginning  of  Years  or  A 
Jacobite''s  Exile,  and  then  to  ask  whether  any 
imitative  poetry  has  ever  rung  like  that. 
There  is  the  same  golden  music  in  both ;  and 
that  music  expresses  something  great  in  the 
poet's  soul,  a  divine  energy  of  emotion  not 
hampered  by  doubt  or  chilled  by  fear.  It  is 
often  said  that  his  poetry  contains  nothing  but 
music ;  it  would  be  as  foolish  to  say  of  music 
itself  that  it  contains  nothing  but  music ;  for 
60 


Algernon  Charles  Swinburne 

all  real  music,  whether  of  words  or  of  notes, 
expresses  a  real  emotion.  We  are  apt  not  to 
give  a  man  credit  for  what  he  can  do  with 
magnificent  ease ;  and  it  is  hard  to  realize  all 
the  learning  and  labour  and  high  thinking  and 
noble  feeling  that  have  gone  to  the  making  of 
that  rushing  music.  Often  it  is  so  swift  that 
we  scarcely  notice  the  thought  latent  in  it. 
The  impetus  of  the  sound  will  not  suffer  our 
minds  to  dwell  on  the  sense.  But  still  the 
sense  is  there  in  all  his  finer  poems,  and  he 
himself  has  warned  us  of  the  fact  in  a  beauti- 
ful image  : — 

For  life's  helm  rocks  to  the  windward  and  lee, 
And  time  is  as  wind,  and  as  waves  are  we  ; 

And  song  is  as  foam  that  the  sea-winds  fret, 
Though  the  thought  at  its  heart  should  be  deep  as 
the  sea. 

Swinburne  was  never  an  "  intellectual."  He 
was  too  sure  of  things  for  that,  and  had  too 
simple  a  delight  in  life  and  his  art.  But  only 
those  who  know  nothing  of  poetic  processes 
would  call  him  a  brainless  poet.  He  did  not 
argue  or  analyse,  because  he  held  that  he  had 
something  better  to  do ;  but  we  can  see  from  his 
criticism  that  his  theory  of  poetry  was  clear 
and  consistent.  Poetry  for  him  was  a  means  of 
expressing  emotion  in  terms  of  beauty ;  it 
6l 


Essays  on  Books 

might  do  other  things,  but  they  were  not 
essential.  The  emotion  and  the  material 
beauty  were  essential,  the  one  being  the  ex- 
pression of  the  other.  No  doubt  he  carried 
this  theory  to  an  extreme  in  his  practice;  he 
was  too  determined  to  express  emotion  in  every 
line  and  to  make  every  line  beautiful  ever  to 
write  a  good  play  or  a  good  narrative  poem. 
All  the  people  in  his  plays  make  poetry  about 
the  situation ;  they  do  not  live  and  move  and 
have  their  being  in  it,  and  Tristram  of 
Lyonesse  is  a  series  of  magnificent  distractions 
from  the  story.  But  in  the  plays  he  speaks 
sometimes  like  a  great  tragic  poet,  although  he 
can  never  manage  the  action  about  which  he 
speaks.  Here  is  the  end  of  Locrine,  in  which 
Gwendolen,  having  defeated  and  killed  her 
husband  and  his  paramour  in  battle,  says  that 
she  will  not  refuse  them  burial : — 

Not  I  would  sunder  tomb  from  tomb 
Of  these  twain  foes  of  mine,  in  death  made  one— 
I,  that  when  darkness  hides  me  from  the  sun 
Shall  sleep  alone,  with  none  to  rest  by  me.  • 

But  thou — this  one  time  more  I  look  on  thee — 
Fair  face,  brave  hand,  weak  heart  that  wast  not  mine — 
Sleep  sound— and  God  be  good  to  thee,  Locrine. 
I  was  not.     She  was  fair  as  heaven  in  spring 
Whom  thou  didst  love  indeed.   Sleep,  queen  and  king, 
Forgiven  ;  and  if— God  knows— being  dead,  ye  live, 
And  keep  remembrance  yet  of  me — forgive. 
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Algernon  Charles  Swinburne 

To  show  what  variety  there  is  to  be  found 

in  this  poet,  often  called  monotonous,  we  will 

quote  a  passage  in  the  same  metre  from  the 

description    of    the    loves    of    Tristram    and 

Iseult : — 

Like  fire 
The  lit  dews  lightened  on  the  leaves,  as  higher 
Night's  heart  beat   on  toward   midnight.     Far  and 

fain 
Somewhiles  the  soft  rush  of  rejoicing  rain 
Solaced  the  darkness,  and  from  steep  to  steep 
Of  heaven  they  saw  the  sweet  sheet  lightning  leap 
And  laugh  its  heart  out  in  a  thousand  smiles, 
When  the  clear  sea  for  miles  on  glimmering  miles 
Burned  as  though  dawn  were  strewn  abroad  astray, 
Or,  showering  out  of  heaven,  all  heaven's  array 
Had  paven  instead  the  waters. 

In  passages  like  this,  and,  indeed,  in  the  whole 
poem,  romantic  poetry  exhausts  its  possibilities. 
The  romantic  process  of  combining  human 
passions  and  natural  forces  in  one  complicated 
harmony  could  not  be  carried  any  further, 
nor  could  the  appropriate  romantic  effects 
of  versification.  No  further  development  is 
possible  in  the  art  of  poetry  as  Swinburne 
practised  it.  He  has  had  a  few  imitators,  but 
only  one  notable  follower.  Professor  Gilbert 
Murray,  translating  the  most  romantic  of 
Greek  poets,  has  divined,  perhaps  almost 
unconsciously,  that  he  could  not  do  justice  to 
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Essays  on  Books 

the  art  of  his  original,  except  with  an  art  no 
less  highly  wrought.  If  there  had  been  any 
dullness  or  crudity  in  the  language  and  verse  of 
his  translation,  it  must  have  failed  altogether. 
There  was  only  one  contemporary  style  equal 
to  the  task,  and  that  was  the  style  of  Swin- 
burne. The  success  of  the  translator  proves, 
not  only  his  own  genius,  but  the  greatness  of 
both  his  originals.  The  mind  of  Euripides 
is  equal  to  the  language  of  Swinburne,  and 
the  language  of  Swinburne  to  the  mind  of 
Euripides.  There  is  also  a  pleasant  irony  in 
the  feat,  since  Swinburne's  hatred  of  Euripides 
was  one  of  his  few  critical  perversities. 

Hitherto,  we  fear,  we  may  seem  to  have 
made  too  many  apologies  for  the  great  poet. 
That  is  the  worst  of  criticism,  it  must  be 
always  either  detracting  or  apologizing ;  to 
express  the  glory  of  a  master  is  beyond  the 
powers  of  any  critic.  The  final  question  to  be 
put  about  a  poet  is  this — Has  he  increased  our 
sense  of  the  value  of  the  noble  things  of  life  ? 
To  do  that  is  the  function  of  all  art,  not  by 
argument  but  by  expression.  Therefore,  in 
considering  what  we  owe  to  the  genius  of 
Swinburne,  we  should  not  ask  what  ideas  we 
have  got  from  him,  but  what  emotions,  and  of 
what  nature  and  strength  ;  for  emotion  is  our 
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Algernon  Charles  Swinburne 

final  test  of  the  values  of  things.  To  this 
question  there  can  be  only  one  answer.  Those 
who  are  familiar  with  his  greatest  works  know 
that  they  communicate  noble  emotions  with 
irresistible  power;  his  music  puts  us  in  love 
with  life ;  and  we  can  only  love  the  best  of  life. 
Even  in  that  earlier  poetry  of  his  that  seems 
all  melodious  despair,  it  is  really  the  thwarted 
and  troubled  glory  of  life  that  he  sings.  The 
music  of  Before  the  Beginning  of  Years  is 
exultant,  whatever  the  sense  may  be.  In  his 
poetry,  life,  freed  from  all  routine  and  in-ele- 
vance,  is  represented  in  music  as  a  conflict  of 
vast  significance  between  good  and  evil  forces, 
and  the  evil  forces,  like  Milton's  Satan,  have 
splendour  and  greatness.  Even  when  Swin- 
burne hates  he  never  sneers  ;  and  his  invective, 
however  extreme,  is  like  the  shadow  cast  by  a 
bright  light.  What  is  it  that  we  remember  of 
his  two  sonnets  to  the  White  Tsar  ?  Not  what 
he  denounces,  but  what  he  glorifies  ;  not  the 
abuse,  but  the  passage  in  which  he  tells  the 
Tsar  to  take  heed  lest  his  crownless  head  lie 
low: — 

By  his  of  Spain  who  dared  an  English  Queen 
With  half  a  world  to  hearten  him  for  fight, 
Till  the  wind  gave  his  warriors  and  their  might 
To  shipwreck  and  the  corpse-encumbered  sea. 
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Essays  on  Books 

No  doubt  he  could  hate,  and  exulted  some- 
times in  expressing  his  hatred.  But  his 
genius  lay  not  in  hatred,  but  in  love ;  and  his 
noblest  poems  are  those  which  express  love  of 
what  is  best  worth  loving.  All  greatness  and 
beauty,  whether  of  nature  or  of  man,  fired  him ; 
he  was  like  the  legendary  statue  that  burst 
into  music  when  touched  by  the  rays  of  the 
sun.  In  the  sestet  of  his  finest  sonnet  he 
praised  two  leaders  who  seemed  to  him  to 
refuse  the  highest  hopes  of  mankind,  and 
with  this  we  will  end  instead  of  praising  him 
further : — 

Honour  not  hate  we  give  you,  love  not  fear, 
Last  prophets  of  past  kind,  who  fill  the  dome 

Of  great  dead  Gods  with  wrath  and  wail,  nor  hear 
Time's   word   and   man's  :    "  Go   honoured   hence, 
go  home. 

Night's  childless  children  ;  here  your  hour  is  done ; 

Pass  with  the  stars,  and  leave  us  with  the  sun." 


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The  Wonderful  Visitor        <::>       o       o 

MR.  GOSSE  was  bom,  and  bred,  to  write 
the  life  of  Swinburne ;  and  it  is  a 
piece  of  luck  for  the  immediate  reputation 
of  the  poet.  An  official  biography  would  have 
made  him  seem  uninteresting  to  all  the  young ; 
they  would  have  glanced  at  it,  said  "  Just  what 
I  thought,"  and  read  his  poems  no  more.  But 
you  cannot  glance  at  this  book  without  reading 
it  through ;  and  having  read  it,  you  will  wish 
to  read  the  poems  again.  To  treat  Swinburne 
in  an  official  manner  would  be  like  breaking  a 
Bird  of  Paradise  on  the  wheel ;  and  never  for 
a  moment  has  Mr.  Gosse  attempted  to  do  so. 
There  is  a  Swinburne  legend  which  would  have 
been  killed  by  an  official  biography,  but  Mr. 
Gosse  authenticates  it  for  us  ;  he  convinces  us 
that  our  most  delightful  dreams  about  the  poet 
were  true,  and  that  the  truth  is  even  better 
than  the  dreams.  Could  a  book  full  of  so 
much  good  fun  have  been  written  about  any 
other  great  poet  ?  Hogg  came  near  it  in  his 
67 


Essays  on  Books 

fragment  of  a  life  of  Shelley ;  but  the  family 
suppressed  him,  and  throughout  his  book  the 
fun  is  marred  by  a  sense  of  insecurity.  Shelley 
is  always  a  tragic  figure,  tragic  for  others  as 
well  as  himself;  but  Swinburne's  life  is  like 
summer  lightning, 

I  do  not  mean  that  Mr.  Gosse  makes  him 
seem  futile  or  ridiculous.  Love  and  admira- 
tion are  implied  in  everything  he  says ;  but  he 
is  not  going  to  make  the  poet  insipid  ;  his  aim 
is  to  give  us  his  exact  and  exquisite  quality, 
which  he  does  in  a  number  of  stories,  a  number 
of  delicate  phrases,  all  carried  on  in  the  quiet 
stream  of  his  narrative.  He  does  not  criticize 
the  poems  much,  though  what  he  says  of  them 
is  both  just  and  amusing;  but,  after  reading 
his  book,  we  shall  understand  them  better  and 
enjoy  them  more.  For  he  shows  us  the  con- 
nexion between  the  solemn,  august  part  of  the 
poet  and  his  childishness;  he  makes  the  two 
one ;  and  until  we  see  them  as  one  we  cannot 
do  him  justice. 

Swinburne  was  a  wonderful  visitor  to  this 
earth,  like  Mr.  Wells's  angel ;  he  was  like  an 
angel  of  Florentine  fifteenth-century  art,  imp- 
ish and  beautiful,  and  the  more  beautiful 
because  impish.  Every  story  about  him  is 
in  character,  like  the  stories  about  Mozart ;  he 
68 


The  Wonderful  Visitor 

ought  himself  to  have  been  in  The  Magic  Flute, 
and  to  have  played  his  tricks  and  sung  his 
divine  songs  in  that  paradise  of  music.  He 
was  often  absurd,  and  yet  always  in  character, 
with  an  absurdity  which  his  friends  loved 
because  it  was  his,  for  it  was  beautiful,  like 
a  child's  errors  of  speech.  It  makes  one  laugh, 
but  never  with  a  sense  of  superiority  over  him  ; 
and  it  is  also  pathetic,  for  he  was  always  losing 
his  way  like  a  child  in  the  world,  and  until 
Watts-Dunton  became  his  nurse  there  was  no 
one  to  look  after  him.  Mr.  Gosse  expresses 
the  pathos  of  it  in  the  most  delicate  way.  He 
tells  us,  for  instance,  of  an  evening  in  1877, 
when  Swinburne  was  forty,  but  still  a  child. 
He  went  to  Swinburne's  rooms  to  hear  him  read 
the  essay  on  Charlotte  Bronte  : — 

Algernon  was  standing  alone  in  the  middle 
of  the  floor,  with  one  hand  in  the  breast  of  his 
coat  and  the  other  jerking  at  his  side.  He 
had  an  arrangement  of  chairs,  with  plates  and 
glasses  set  on  the  table,  as  if  for  a  party.  He 
looked  like  a  conjuror  who  was  waiting  for  his 
audience.  He  referred  vaguely  to  "  the  others," 
and  said  that,  while  they  delayed  in  coming, 
he  would  read  me  a  new  poem  he  had  just 
finished.  .  .  .  The  poem  was  very  magnificent, 
but  rather  difficult  to  follow,  and  very  long. 
It  took  some  time  to  read ;  and  still  no  one 
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Essays  on  Books 

came.  As  the  evening  was  slipping  away  I 
asked  him  presently  whether  the  reading  of 
C.  Bronte  should  not  begin.  Whereupon  he 
answered,  "  Fm  expecting  Watts  and  Ned 
Burne-Jones  and  Philip  Marston,  and — some 
other  men.  I  hope  they'll  come  soon,"  We 
waited  a  little  while  in  silence,  in  the  twilight, 
and  then  Swinburne  said,  "  I  hope  I  didn't 
forget  to  ask  them."  He  then  trotted  or 
glided  into  his  bedroom,  and  what  he  referred 
to  there  I  don't  know,  but  almost  instantly  he 
came  out  and  said  cheerfully,  "  Ah !  I  find  I 
didn't  ask  any  of  those  men,  so  we'll  begin  at 
once."  After  he  had  read  long  and  with 
amazing  violence  "  he  seemed  quite  exhausted, 
and  sank  into  a  kind  of  dream  into  the  corner 
of  his  broad  sofa,  his  tiny  feet  pressed  tight 
together,  and  I  stole  away." 

Life  was  as  dangerous  to  him  as  to  a  child, 
and  yet  he  passed  through  it,  as  he  passed 
through  London  traffic,  though  he  seemed  in 
danger  of  being  run  over  every  moment.  But 
on  one  point  the  common  legend  about  him 
does  him  an  injustice,  like  the  common  opinion 
of  his  poetry ;  it  does  injustice  to  his  intellect. 
He  had,  as  Mr.  Gosse  says,  great  savoir-faire 
and  a  very  shrewd  judgment  of  character.  If 
he  had  wished  to  be  a  man  of  the  world  he 
misht  have  been  one.  He  could  understand 
whatever  he  wished  to  understand,  like  Shelley, 
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The  Wonderful   Visitor 

and  he  had  more  sympathy  than  Shelley. 
No  one  has  ever  done  justice  to  the  subtlety 
of  his  novel  Love's  Cross  Cu7-rents\  and 
even  Mr.  Gosse  only  mentions  it  by  name. 
But  in  it  he  shows  a  power,  like  that  of  Henry 
James,  to  give  us  the  very  scent  of  character,  a 
power  which  he  left  undeveloped  in  his  poetry. 
He  was  also,  unlike  the  minor  poets  who  tried 
to  imitate  him,  a  hard  worker  and  a  great 
scholar.  "He  is,"  Ruskin  said  in  1866, 
"simply  one  of  the  mightiest  scholars  of  his 
age  in  Europe."  Further,  as  Mr.  Gosse  points 
out,  there  is  in  Songs  before  Sunrise  a 
philosophic  power  beyond  that  of  any  other 
poet  of  the  time.  But  the  music  of  these 
poems  is  so  loud  that  it  drowns  the  thought 
in  them  ;  and  every  one  said,  and  still  says, 
that  he  was  merely  a  singer  with  a  wonderful 
organ.  That  belief  was  encouraged  by  his 
impishness ;  we  expect  a  great  poet  to  be 
solemn,  and  Swinburne  could  be  solemn  only 
with  a  child's  insecurity ;  at  any  moment  he 
would  turn  to  the  game  of  abusing  those  whom 
he  delighted  to  abuse,  and  the  more  fiercely 
he  did  it  the  more  it  was  a  game  to  him. 

All  rage  and  bitterness  were  a  game  to  him, 
which  he  learnt  from    Victor  Hugo.     "  From 
his    satirical    poems,"   says    Mr.    Gosse,    "he 
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Essays  on  Books 

adopted  a  certain  attitude  of  being  astride  the 
barricades  of  existence,  shouting  at  the  top  of 
his  voice  with  a  flambeau  in  his  fist.  It  was 
inconsistent  with  the  dignity,  gentleness,  and 
docility  which  were  also  natural  to  him." 
Yes,  it  is  a  distressing  fact  about  children 
that  they  will  incessantly  shout.  It  -spoils  the 
music  of  their  voices,  and  often  it  spoiled  the 
music  of  Swinburne's,  and  also  drowned  his 
thought.  Mr.  Gosse  tells  us  plainly  that  he 
was  never  fit  to  live  at  liberty  in  London ;  but 
he  had  this  great  good  fortune,  and  also  merit, 
that,  whatever  his  "irregularities"  when  he 
was  there,  he  could  always  return  home  to  his 
family  like  a  child  that  has  hurt  itself;  and  at 
home  he  was  a  happy  and  peaceful  child.  In 
1871  Henry  Kingsley  wrote,  in  a  letter,  of  his 
behaviour  with  his  father  and  mother.  "I 
believe  Algy  is  very  eccentric  in  London,  but 
I  never  see  him  there.  Here  he  is  a  perfectly 
courteous  little  gentleman."  So  it  was  natural 
to  write  of  the  divine  poet  and  the  man  of 
thirty-four  ;  his  father  said  of  him  :  "  God  has 
endowed  my  son  with  genius,  but  He  has  not 
vouchsafed  to  grant  him  self-control."  One 
can  see  that  to  his  parents  he  was  always  a 
child,  and  also  that  he  was  content  to  be  a 
child  to  them  and  to  love  them  like  a  child ; 
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The  Wonderful  Visitor 

yet,  when  his  father  died,  he    wrote  a   poem 
about  him  that  will  make  his  name  immortal. 

Mr.  Shaw  has  said  somewhere  that  Swin- 
burne wrote  about  literature  poetry  almost  as 
good  as  other  poets  have  written  about  life. 
That  seems  a  just  condemnation  of  the  poet 
— until  you  read  his  best  poetry.  Then  the 
problem  is — What  was  the  nature  of  the 
power  which  produced  this  poetry  ?  Mr. 
Gosse's  book  helps  us  to  solve  it.  We  see 
that  Swinburne,  whatever  else  he  may  have 
been,  was  not  one  who  exploited  himself  for 
literary  purposes.  To  talk  of  his  marvellous 
technical  gifts  as  if  they  were  separate  from 
his  mind  and  character  is  to  fall  into  a  dan- 
gerous error  about  him  and  about  the  nature 
of  art.  Only  a  great  poet  has  marvellous 
technical  gifts  in  poetry ;  and  a  man  can  be 
a  great  poet  only  with  the  whole  of  himself. 
Swinburne  did  not,  as  critics  have  supposed, 
experience  life  at  two  removes  ;  but  life  was 
very  much  simplified  to  him,  as  it  is  to  most 
children.  Like  them,  he  believed  always  that 
he  could  have  his  heaven  here  and  now  on 
this  earth ;  and  what  was  not  heaven  to  him 
was  hell.  His  heaven  here  and  now  was 
peopled  with  saints  and  angels,  and  his  hell 
with  devils;  not  devils  that  he  really  hated 
73 


Essays  on  Books 

or  feared,  but  a  gargoyle  kind  of  devil,  for 
which  he  delighted  to  find  invective.  He 
enjoyed  them  almost  as  much  as  his  angels, 
enjoyed  telling  them  what  he  thought  of 
them,  as  a  mediaeval  sculptor  enjoyed  carving 
gargoyles.  He  saw  life  as  an  incessant  war 
between  them  and  his  angels,  in  which  the 
angels  always  triumphed  like  Michael  over  the 
dragon  ;  and  he  sang  the  songs  of  triumph. 

Some    of  those   songs,  like    other  religious 
exercises,    are   long   and   tiresome;    they    are 
like  the  Athanasian  Creed    set   to  Handelian 
music.      But    he    could    praise    more    magni- 
ficently   than  any    poet   that   has   ever  lived, 
like  a  choir  of  Correggio's  young-eyed  cheru- 
bim.    To  think  of  his  gift  for  music  as  if  it 
were    physical    like    a    great    voice    is    to    be 
lost  in   a   false   analogy ;    his   music  was  the 
answer  of  his  spirit  to  the  universe,  of  a  reality 
in  him  to  a  reality  outside  him.     There  was 
ritual  in  it,  as  if  he  were  a  young  priest,  an 
Ion,   of  the    universe;    he    waved   his   censer, 
he  made  his  obeisances,  he  raised  his  chant; 
and  there  are  times  when  we  wish  our  poets 
to  be  men  talking,  not  priests  chanting.     For 
Swinburne  all   life  was  a  wonderful   memory, 
not  a  sudden  surprising  discovery.     His  heroes, 
even  while  he  stood  face  to  face   with  them, 
74 


The  Wonderful  Visitor 

were  legendary  to  him ;  Mazzini  was  like 
Harmodius,  Victor  Hugo  like  ^schylus  ;  the 
past  ordered  the  present  for  his  mind ;  he  lived 
not  in  time  but  in  a — 

Steadfast  rest  of  all  things  firmly  stayed 
Upon  the  pillars  of  eternity ; 

and  his  very  impishness  and  naughtiness  were 
but  a  refusal  to  have  any  dealings  with  the 
transitory  and  particular.  The  universal 
alone  existed  for  him ;  and  his  is  a  poetry  of 
the  universal,  both  in  its  themes  and  in  its 
method.  It  is  all  religious  poetry  as  much  as 
the  poetry  of  Crashaw ;  the  only  difference 
is  in  the  subject-matter.  He  writes  about 
Mazzini  as  Crashaw  writes  about  St.  Theresa ; 
and  about  the  Republic  as  Crashaw  writes 
about  the  Name  above  every  name,  the  Name 
of  Jesus.  You  may  call  either  poet  empty, 
vague,  artificial,  if  you  will  and  are  deaf  to 
their  music ;  but  this  music  expresses  a  uni- 
versal that  cannot  be  expressed  otherwise  in 
words,  and  one  of  which  they  were  actually 
aware  in  their  own  experience.  They  them- 
selves remained  young-eyed  cherubim  through 
all  the  routine  of  life ;  and  if  we  will  not  listen 
to  their  music,  that  is  our  loss. 
Swinburne  did  not  grow  old  like  other  men. 
75 


Essays  on  Books 

He  merely  became  aware  of  the  fact  that  he 
needed  a  nurse,  and  retired  into  the  safe 
nursery  that  Watts-Dunton  made  for  him  at 
Putney.  VVatts-Dunton  had  the  weaknesses 
common  to  the  best  of  nurses :  he  was  over- 
officious,  over-watchful,  over-eager  to  keep  his 
charge  from  playing  with  bad  boys  who  might 
lead  him  into  mischief,  and  he  tried  to  teach 
him  his  own  very  domestic  wisdom.  This,  too 
often,  Swinljurne  accepted  like  a  good  child, 
and  recanted  his  old  admirations  with  the  old 
childish  vehemence.  Mr.  Gosse,  very  naturally, 
is  a  little  impatient  of  this  nursery  tyranny ; 
but  it  must  have  prolonged  the  poet's  life,  and 
he  was  happy  and  healthy  under  it.  "  He 
went  on  gliding  over  the  commons  of  Wim- 
bledon with  the  old  noiseless  regularity,  but 
it  could  hardly  be  said  that  he  held  a  place 
any  longer  in  the  ordinary  world  around  him." 
More  than  ever  he  lived  on  memories  ;  and  his 
later  poetry  seems  all  to  be  made  out  of  the 
memories  of  his  youth.  But  we  think  that 
Mr.  Gosse,  like  every  one  else,  is  unjust  to  it. 
It  is  not  all  the  poetry  of  mere  momentum  and 
habit.  If  the  lines  on  John  William  Inchbold, 
in  the  third  series  of  Poems  and  Ballads,  had 
appeared  in  the  first,  they  would  be  famous ; 
but  the  world  had  made  up  its  mind  that 
76 


The   Wonderful   Visitor 

Swinburne  was  only  echoing  himself,  and  it 
listened  to  him  no  longer.  Perhaps  some 
foohsh  people  will  think  that  Mr.  Gosse  has 
not  been  reverent  enough  to  him  ;  but  there 
is  in  his  book  that  reverence  which  does  not 
fear  to  tell  the  affectionate  truth. 


77 


Donne's  Sermons        o       ^       <>       ^ 

THERE  is  a  legend  that  Donne  was  the 
greatest  of  English  preachers,  but  even 
those  who  read  old  books,  even  those  who  read 
his  poetry,  do  not  read  his  sermons.  Mr. 
Pearsall  Smith  has  made  a  selection  from  them 
and  he  begins  by  telling  us  why  they  are  unread. 
There  are  very  many  of  them,  they  are  very 
long ;  and  Donne  had  "  the  unhappy  faculty  of 
developing  to  the  utmost  the  faults  of  any 
form  of  literary  expression  he  adopted."  The 
worst  fault  of  the  sermon,  as  literature,  is  that 
it  is  preaching.  We  make  it  a  reproach  against 
writers  when  they  preach,  not  merely  because 
preaching  is  out  of  place  except  in  sermons, 
but  because  in  itself  it  is  disagreeable.  We 
do  not  like  a  man  who  preaches,  in  the  pulpit 
or  out  of  it ;  for  in  the  process  he  ceases  to  be 
human — men  are  not  born  to  preach  to  each 
other — he  loses  the  good  faith  of  the  artist, 
he  tells  us  not  what  he  has  to  say,  but  what 
78 


Donne's   Sermons 

he  thinks  we  ought  to  hear.  The  convention 
of  sermons  changes,  but  it  is  never  a  good  one  ; 
it  is  always  a  giant's  robe,  awkwardly  worn  by 
men  as  dwarfish  as  the  rest  of  us.  When  he 
enters  the  pulpit  the  priest  must  pretend  to 
be  a  prophet  ;  however  humble  he  be  by 
nature,  that  pretence  makes  him  speak  with 
alien  jaws,  louder  than  his  wont,  with  a 
solemnity  not  his  and  a  conviction  he  has  not 
earned.  Some  few  of  us  read  sermons  of  to- 
day because  we  are  used  to  their  convention 
and  hope  they  will  do  us  good ;  but  we  do  not 
read  sermons  of  yesterday,  or  of  the  seven- 
teenth century.  As  Mr.  Pearsall  Smith  puts 
it,  they  seem  to  belong  to  some  remote 
geological  era  of  human  thought. 

But  he  has  read  Donne's  sermons  more  than 
once,  and  he  has  found  in  them,  like  an 
excavator  among  palgeolithic  remains,  frag- 
ments of  art,  of  eloquence,  of  passion.  The 
great  poet  was  not  lost  in  the  preacher,  but 
transmuted ;  Donne  himself  says,  thinking  no 
doubt  of  his  own  case,  that  a  voluptuous  man, 
turned  to  God,  will  "  find  plenty  and  delicious- 
ness  enough  in  him,  to  feed  his  soul,  as  with 
marrow,  and  with  fatness,  as  David  expresses 
it ;  and  so  an  angry  and  passionate  man  will 
find  zeal  enough  in  the  house  of  God  to  eat 
79 


Essays  on  Books 

him  up."     The  example  he  gives  is  obsolete  to 
us,  but  it  must  have  been  apt  enough  to  him. 

Solomon,  whose  disposition  was  amorous, 
and  excessive  in  the  love  of  women,  when  he 
turn'd  to  God,  departed  not  utterly  from  his 
old  phrase  and  language,  but  having  put  a 
new,  and  a  spiritual  tincture,  and  form  and 
habit  in  all  his  thought,  and  words,  he  conveys 
all  his  loving  approaches  and  applications  to 
God,  and  all  God's  gracious  answers  to  his 
amorous  soul,  into  songs,  and  Epithalamians, 
and  meditations  upon  contracts,  and  marriages 
between  God  and  his  Church,  and  between 
God  and  his  soul. 

We  may  smile  at  the  notion  that  it  was 
a  converted  Solomon  who  sang  the  Song  of 
Solomon,  but  the  converted  Donne  did  con- 
tinue to  sing  even  in  the  pulpit ;  he  could  not 
be  subdued  to  what  he  worked  in ;  and  Mr. 
Pearsall  Smith  has  rescued  these  beauties  and 
made  an  anthology  of  them,  saving  us  all  the 
pains  that  he  has  taken  and  we  could  never 
have  endured. 

Donne  is  here  one  of  the  greatest  of  our 
prose  writers,  in  some  things  unequalled.  The 
sermons  are  not  written  as  they  were  preached ; 
he  took  no  fully  written  manuscript  into  the 
pulpit,  Mr.  Pearsall  Smith  tells  us,  but  wrote 
from  memory  afterwards,  with  many  additions 
80 


Donne's   Sermons 

and  changes.  Yet  here  we  have  the  spoken 
rather  than  the  written  word ;  we  can  almost 
hear  the  voice  of  the  speaker,  who  thinks 
aloud,  and  should  be  read  aloud  if  all  his 
beauty  is  to  be  perceived.  Words  themselves 
set  him  thinking  and  feeling ;  the  momentum 
of  his  mind  presses  through  them  and  is 
increased  by  them — is  increased  also,  even  to 
us  now  as  we  read,  by  the  presence  of  the 
listening  congregation.  They  had  their  part, 
as  with  all  great  speakers,  in  the  making  of 
these  sermons,  with  their  eager  silence,  their 
expectant  spirits.  As  the  plays  of  Shakespeare 
were  made  for  the  theatre,  so  was  this  eloquence 
made  for  the  church  ;  and  it  is  still  quick  with 
that  intercourse,  not  closet  eloquence,  but  a 
man  speaking  at  one  particular  moment  to 
other  men.  If  any  speaker  to-day  would  train 
himself  in  eloquence,  he  could  not  do  better 
than  to  get  some  passages  of  Donne  by  heart ; 
not  to  imitate  them,  but  because  they  have 
the  rhythm  of  speech,  mastering  thought 
natural  to  the  speaker  and  at  one  with  it. 
Often,  even  in  the  greatest  passages,  the 
thought  is  obsolete  to  us;  but  the  passion, 
even  the  idea,  lives  through  its  past  intellectual 
forms.  Donne,  for  instance,  as  in  a  famous 
poem  of  his,  takes  the  Resurrection  of  the 
F  8l 


Essays  on  Books 

Body  literally,  almost  ludicrously,  but  he 
rushes  through  his  literal  details  to  a  close 
the  more  magnificent  and  surprising  because 
of  them. 

In  what  corner,  in  what  ventricle  of  the 
sea,  lies  all  the  jelly  of  a  Body  drowned  in  the 
gener  all  flood?  What  coheerence,  what  sym- 
pathy, what  dependence  maintaines  any  rela- 
tion, any'  correspondence,  between  that  arm 
that  was  lost  in  Europe,  and  that  leg  that  was 
lost  in  Afrique  or  Asia,  scores  of  years  between  ? 
One  humour  of  our  dead  body  produces  worms, 
and  those  worms  suck  and  exhaust  aU  other 
humour,  and  then  all  dies,  and  all  dries,  and 
molders  into  dust,  and  that  dust  is  blowen 
into  the  River,  and  that  puddled  water 
tumbled  into  the  sea,  and  that  ebs  and  flows 
in  infinite  revolutions,  and  still,  still  God 
knows  in  what  cabinet  every  seed-Pearle  lies, 
in  what  part  of  the  world  every  grain  of  every 
mans  dust  lies ;  and,  sihilat  popidum  s^ium, 
(as  his  Prophet  speaks  in  another  case)  he 
whispers,  he  hisses,  he  beckens,  for  the  bodies 
of  his  Saints,  and  in  the  twinckling  of  an  eye, 
that  body  that  was  scattered  over  all  the 
elements,  is  sate  down  at  the  right  hand  of 
God,  in  a  glorious  resurrection. 

There  is  a  poem  by  Gerard  Hopkins,  Of 

the  Comfort  of  the  Resurrection,  that  seems 

to  remember  this  passage,  even  to  use  Donne's 

method,  though  with  another  poet's  freedom. 

82 


Donne's   Sermons 

At  least  there  is,  with  the  same  theme,  the 
same  surprise  in  the  close — 

Flesh  fade,  and  mortal  trash 
Fall  to  the   residuary  worm  ;   world's  wildfire,  leave 
but  ash. 

In  a  flash,  at  a  trumpet  crash, 
I  am  at  once  what  Christ  is,  since  He  was  what  I 

am,  and 
This   Jack,  joke,  poor   potsherd,   patch,  matchwood, 
immortal  diamond, 

Is  immortal  diamond. 

Donne,  too,  has  Hopkins's  trick  of  letting  one 
word  call  up  another  with  its  sound,  a  trick 
that  would  be  tiresome  if  we  could  not  almost 
hear  him,  in  the  silence  of  his  congregation, 
making  music  and  sense  of  his  echoes. 

When  it  comes  to  this  height,  that  the  fever 
is  not  in  the  humors,  but  in  the  spirits,  that 
mine  enemy  is  not  an  imaginary  enemy,  fortune, 
nor  a  transitory  enemy,  malice  in  great  persons, 
but  a  reall,  and  an  irresistible,  and  an  inexor- 
able, and  an  everlasting  enemy,  the  Lord  of 
Hosts  himselfe,  the  Almighty  God  himselfe, 
the  Almighty  God  himselfe  onley  knows  the 
waight  of  this  affliction,  and  except  hee  put  in 
that  pondics  gloriae,  that  exceeding  waight  of 
an  eternal  glory,  with  his  owne  hand  into  the 
other  scale,  we  are  waighed  downe,  we  are 
swallowed  up,  irreparably,  irrevocably,  irre- 
mediably. 

83 


Essays  on  Books 

There  are    passages    of   confession,  as  well  as 
ecstasy,  that  remind  us  of  Augustine — 

I  throwe  myselfe  downe  in  my  Chamber, 
and  I  call  in,  and  invite  God,  and  his  Angels 
thither,  and  when  they  are  there,  I  neglect 
God  and  his  Angels  for  the  noise  of  a  Flie, 
for  the  ratling  of  a  Coach,  for  the  whining  of 
a  doore ;  I  take  on  in  the  same  posture  of 
praying ;  Eyes  lifted  up  ;  knees  bowed  downe ; 
as  though  I  prayed  to  God;  and,  if  God  or 
his  Angels  should  ask  me,  when  I  thought 
last  of  God  in  that  prayer,  I  cannot  tell. 
Sometimes  I  finde  that  I  had  forgot  what  I 
was  about,  but  when  I  began  to  forget  it,  I 
cannot  tell. 

This  honesty  makes  him  humane  even  in 
his  theology  :  "  Never  propose  to  thyself  such 
a  God,  as  thou  wert  not  bound  to  imitate ; 
thou  mistakest  God,  if  thou  make  him  to  be 
any  such  thing,  or  make  him  to  do  any  such 
thing,  as  thou  in  thy  proportions  shouldst  not 
do."  The  magnanimous  man,  such  as  Donne 
was,  remains  magnanimous  even  in  his  ortho- 
doxy ;  he  does  indeed  love  his  God  and  would 
not  show  Him  unlovable.  Nor,  being  a  poet, 
would  he  lower  men's  spirits  from  his  vantage- 
ground  in  the  pulpit.  "  David  proposes  to 
himself,  that  he  would  sing  of  mercy,  and  of 
judgement ;  but  it  is  of  mercy  first ;  and  not  of 
84 


Donne's   Sermons 

judgement  at  all  otherwise  than  it  will  come 
into  a  song."  It  was  the  artist  in  him  that 
freed  him  from  the  pedantries  of  imprecation  ; 
he  knew  they  were  ugly  and  that  God  does 
not  love  ugliness.  Then,  in  a  long  passage, 
too  long  to  be  all  quoted  but  short  enough 
when  read,  he  exalts  his  priesthood  not  in  a 
vain  professional  pride  but  for  a  pretty,  un- 
expected reason. 

What  a  Coronation  is  our  taking  of  orders, 
by  which  God  makes  us  a  Royall  Priesthood. 
And  what  an  inthroriization  is  the  coming  up 
into  a  pulpit,  where  God  invests  His  servants 
with  His  ordinance,  as  with  a  cloud,  and  then 
presses  that  cloud  with  a  Vae  si  non,  woe  be 
unto  thee,  if  thou  doe  not  pr-each,  and  then 
enables  him  to  preach  peace,  mercy,  consolation 
to  the  whole  congregation.  That  God  should 
appeare  in  a  Cloud,  upon  the  Mercy  Seat,  as 
He  promises  Moses  He  will  doe,  that  from  so 
poore  a  man  as  stands  here,  wrapped  up  in 
clouds  of  infirmity,  and  in  clouds  of  iniquity, 
God  should  drop  raine,  poure  down  His  dew, 
and  sweeten  that  dew  with  His  honey,  and 
crust  that  honeyed  dew  into  Manna,  and 
multiply  that  Manna  into  Gomers,  and  fill 
those  Gomers  every  day,  and  give  every 
particular  man  his  Gomer,  give  every  soule  in 
the  congregation,  consolation  by  me  ; — 

So  it   continues   in   a   manner  strange   to    us 
85 


Essays  on  Books 

now ;  but  we  know  he  is  speaking  the  truth 
about  himself,  which  a  man  must  do  if  he  is  to 
persuade  us  that  he  speaks  truth  about  God. 

It  is  a  misfortune  that  Donne  never,  except 
in  a  few  short  poems,  found  a  form  into  which 
he  could  pour  all  his  riches  without  any  dross 
of  pedantry.  Mr.  Pearsall  Smith  has  made 
those  extracts  for  us,  because  he  was  forced  to 
make  them  for  himself.  Donne  never  was  able 
to  separate  his  fire  from  his  smoke ;  and,  the 
more  you  read  him,  the  more  you  conjecture 
that  he  did  not  make  the  best  of  his  life  either. 
The  God  in  him  was  frightened  by  the  beast, 
that  animal  part  of  him  which  he  cowed,  but 
never  transmuted  utterly ;  it  seems  to  growl 
in  the  pedantries  of  his  prose,  as  earlier  in  the 
ugly  fancies  of  his  verse.  He  could  not  attain 
to  the  happy  voluptuousness  of  one  who  sees 
heaven  in  all  beauty ;  for  him  there  was  always 
the  sting  of  lust  and  the  curse  of  mortality  in 
the  flesh.  So  he  longs  always  and  never 
enjoys ;  longs  for  the  unchanging,  since  change 
to  him  is  full  of  danger;  but  there  is  the 
beauty  of  eternity  itself  in  his  longing  for  it, 
and  here  is  prose  that  can  be  put  beside  the 
verse  of  Vaughan — 

A    day    that   hath   no   pridie    or  postridie, 
yesterday  doth  not  usher  it  in,  nor  to-morrow 
86 


Donne's   Sermons 

shall  not  drive  it  out.  Metlutsalem^  with  all 
his  hundreds  of  yeares,  was  but  a  Mushrome  of 
a  night's  growth  to  this  day.  And  all  the  foure 
Monarchies,  with  all  their  thousands  of  yeares, 
And  all  the  powerfull  Kings,  and  all  the 
beautifull  Queenes  of  this  world,  were  but  as  a 
bed  of  flowers,  some  gathered  at  six,  some  at 
seaven,  some  at  eight.  All  in  one  morning,  in 
respect  of  this  Day.  In  all  the  two  thousand 
yeares  of  Nature,  before  the  Law  given  by 
Mose.^,  and  the  two  thousand  yeares  of  Law, 
before  the  Gospel  given  by  Christ,  and  the  two 
thousand  yeares  of  Grace,  which  are  running 
now,  (of  which  last  houre  we  have  heard  three 
quarters  strike,  more  than  fifteen  hundred  of 
this  last  two  thousand  spent)  In  all  his  six 
thousand,  and  in  all  those,  which  God  may  be 
pleased  to  adde.  In  domo  patris,  In  this  House 
of  his  Fathers,  there  was  never  heard  quarter 
clock  to  strike,  never  seen  minute  glasse  to  turn. 

Donne  loved  joy  and  longed  for  it ;  unlike 
many  preachers,  he  preached  it ;  rejoicing,  he 
says,  is  the  serenity  of  Heaven — 

And  he  that  hath  not  this  joy  here,  lacks 
one  of  the  best  pieces  of  his  evidence  for  the 
joyes  of  Heaven  ;  and  hath  neglected  or  refused 
that  Earnest  by  which  God  uses  to  bind  his 
bargaine,  that  true  joy  in  this  world  shall  flow 
into  the  joy  of  Heaven  as  a  river  flows  into  the 
sea. 

But  here,  too,  and  always,  his  beauty  is   the 
87 


Essays  on  Books 

beauty  of  longing ;  the  voice  almost  breaks  in 
its  song ;  he  sows  in  tears,  but  he  has  not 
yet  reaped  in  joy.  He  loved  "  things  extreme 
and  scattering  bright,"  like  the  sun-lit  rim  of 
a  thunder-cloud  ;  his  beauty,  like  Dostoevsky's, 
is  wrung  by  faith  out  of  anguish  ;  and  we  can 
understand  how  men  crowded  to  witness  that 
passion,  not  ks  to  a  show,  but  that  they  might 
share  a  life  more  intense,  if  more  suffering,  than 
their  own.  For  Donne  must  have  lived  in  his 
sermons  as  a  musician  in  his  music ;  men  came 
to  see  a  wind  shaken  by  the  wind,  by  the  wind 
from  an  unknown  country  ;  they  came  to  hear 
words  telling  more  than  words  can,  and  even 
now  they  tell  it  to  us.  As  Mr.  Pearsall  Smith 
says — 

It  sometimes  seems  as  if  he  were  using  time- 
honoured  phrases  of  the  accepted  faith,  its  hope 
of  Heaven,  and  its  terror  of  the  grave,  to 
express  a  vision  of  his  own — a  vision  of  life  and 
death,  of  evil  and  hori'or  and  ecstacy — very 
different  from  that  of  other  preachers ;  and  we 
are  troubled  as  well  as  fascinated  by  the 
strange  music  which  he  blows  through  the 
sacred  trumpets. 

Yes,  we  are  troubled,  and  it  is  a  strange  music, 
in  church,  because  other  divines  preach  content- 
ment, but  Donne  never.     They  see  the  universe 
88 


Donne's   Sermons 

as  a  hierarchy,  with  every  one,  from  God 
through  the  angels  and  saints  and  bishops  and 
priests  and  deacons,  down  to  the  beggar,  in 
his  proper  place.  But  for  Donne,  the  poet, 
the  artist,  as  for  Christ  Himself,  humanity 
makes  all  men  equal  in  desire  for  that  Godhead 
and  eternity  and  paradise  which  it  is  the  aim 
of  all  to  achieve.  Platitudes  about  the  in- 
sufficiency of  this  life  were  real  to  him ;  he 
valued  in  it  only  its  hints  and  whispers  of 
another.  So  he  remained  a  wild  poet  like 
Poe  even  when  he  tried  to  speak  the  language 
of  a  dean ;  like  Poe's,  his  mind  was  haunted 
with  the  thought  of  worms  and  corruption — 
"  the  conqueror  worm  "  might  be  his  phrase — 
because  of  his  passion  for  an  unchanging, 
untroubled  eternity.  In  his  last  sermon  he 
uses  words  to  express  the  indignity  of  decay 
with  an  iteration  almost  mad  : — 

We  must  all  pass  this  posthume  death,  this 
death  after  death,  nay  this  death  after  buriall, 
this  dissolution  after  dissolution,  this  death  of 
corruption  and  putrefaction,  of  vermiculation 
and  incineration,  of  dissolution  and  dispersion 
in  axidt-Jrom  the  fsprave,  when  these  bodies  that 
have  been  the  children  of  royall  parents,  and 
the  parents  of  royall  children,  must  say  with 
Joh,  Corruption,  thou  art  myjatlier,  and  to  the 
Worm,  thou  art  my  mother  and  my  sister. 
89 


Essays  on  Books 

And,  he  ends,  that  we  shall  be — ■ 

mingled  with  the  dust  of  every  highway,  and 
of  every  dung-hill,  and  swallowed  in  every  puddle 
and  pond.  This  is  the  most  inglorious  and  con- 
temptible vilification^  the  most  deadly  and 
peremptory  nullijication  of  man  that  we  can 
consider. 

Like  Diirer's  Melancolia,  this  is  full  of  re- 
volt and  anguished  disappointment  after  the 
glorification  of  man  by  the  Renaissance. 
Raphael  eternized  the  life  of  man  here  and  now 
in  his  School  at  Athens  ;  he  painted  triumphant 
minds  thinking,  untroubled,  for  ever.  Diirer 
showed  how  thinking  troubles  the  mind  of 
man  to  madness,  and  Donne  how  these  beauti- 
ful forms  of  the  flesh  must  be  wasted  in 
cori'uption.  He  could  never  "  forget  to  wonder 
that  men  are  born  to  die " ;  he  was  half  a 
Pagan,  with  a  death's-head  always  at  his  feast, 
even  at  his  feast  of  eloquence ;  but  the  other 
half  of  him  staked  all  on  the  faith  that  his 
desires  were  true,  that  the  will  of  God  was  his 
own  deep,  permanent  will,  and  the  bounty  of 
God  as  infinite  as  his  own  expectation : — 

He  brought  light  out  of  darknesse,  not  out  of 
a  lesser  light ;  he  can  bring  thy  Summer  out  of 
Winter,  though  thou  have  no  Spring ;  though 
in  the  wayes  of  fortune,  or  understanding  or 
conscience,  thou  have  been  benighted  till  now, 

90 


Donne's   Sermons 

wintred  and  frozen,  clouded  and  eclypsed, 
damped  and  benummed,  smothered  and  stupified 
till  now,  now  God  comes  to  thee,  not  as  in  the 
dawning  of  the  day,  not  as  in  the  bud  of  the 
spring,  but  as  the  Sun  at  noon  to  illustrate  all 
shadowes,  as  the  sheaves  in  harvest  to  fill  all 
penuries,  all  occasions  invite  his  mercies,  and 
all  times  are  his  seasons. 


91 


The  Brontes      <:>       <s>       ^c        <3*       ^c* 

THE  writings  of  the  Brontes  tempt  one 
to  continual  curiosity  about  their  lives. 
Villette  and  Wuthering-  Heights  are  wonderful 
books,  to  be  read  for  their  own  sakes ;  but  they 
are  also  events  in  a  still  more  wonderful  story, 
the  story  of  the  Brontes.  Everything  written  by 
Charlotte  seems  to  have  some  reference  to  her 
life,  to  things  which  actually  happened  to  her 
and  not  merely  to  the  inner  experience  of  her 
mind.  So,  when  with  this  curiosity  aroused 
by  her  own  words  we  read  what  is  known 
about  her  and  discover  the  strangeness  of  her 
life,  we  are  tempted  to  find  too  much  of  her 
actual  experience  in  her  novels.  Miss  Sinclair 
seems  to  have  written  her  Three  Brontes  to 
warn  us  against  this  temptation.  It  is  mainly 
a  commentary  upon  other  books  and  contro- 
versial throughout.  We  agree  with  much  of 
it,  but  we  think  that  she  would  have  done 
better  if  she  had  forgotten  the  other  books. 
92 


The  Brontes 

She  is  too  protestant  and  above  all  too  anxious 
to  prove  that  Charlotte  was  not  a  minx  on  the 
look  out  for  a  husband.  One  might  as  well 
defend  St.  Francis  of  Assisi  against  the  charge 
of  other-worldliness.  Minxes  may  have  their 
merits,  but  they  live  on  a  different  level  from 
Charlotte  Bronte.  They  have  designs  on 
people ;  she  had  a  desire  for  a  certain  state 
of  being  to  which  love  was  necessary,  and  for 
that  reason  she  desired  love.  Miss  Sinclair, 
in  her  anxiety  to  prove  that  she  was  no  minx, 
overlooks  this  desire  of  hers,  and  her  Charlotte 
is  too  negative.  Indeed,  in  her  enthusiasm  for 
Emily  she  sometimes  writes  of  Charlotte  like 
an  enemy.  She  speaks  of  Emily's  superb 
attitude  to  life,  her  detachment  from  the 
stream  of  circumstance,  and  then  tells  us  that 
"  Charlotte  was  at  moments  pitifully  immersed 
in  the  stream  of  circumstance,  pitifully  de- 
pendent on  the  material  event."  We  are  not 
sure  what  she  means,  but  we  are  sure  that 
Charlotte  was  never  anything  pitifully.  And 
here  is  a  worse  passage  still : — 

She  had  loved  life,  not  as  Emily  loved  it, 
like  an  equal,  with  power  over  it  and  pride 
and  an  unearthly  understanding,  virgin  and 
unafraid.  There  was  something  slightly  sub- 
servient, consciously  inferior,  in  Charlotte's 
attitude  to  life.      She  had  loved  it  secretly, 

93 


Essays  on  Books 

with  a  sort  of  shame,  with  a  corroding  passion 
and  increduHty  and  despair.  Such  natures  are 
not  seldom  victims  of  the  power  they  would 
propitiate.  It  killed  her  in  her  effort  to  bring 
forth  life. 

As  if  there  were  any  possible  connexion 
between  Charlotte's  physical  incapacity  to  bear 
a  child  and  her  philosophy  or  lack  of  it. 
With  this  kind  of  reasoning  we  might  as  well 
condemn  Wuthering  Heights  because  Emily 
died  of  comsumption  and  say  that  her  stoicism 
was  only  the  armour  of  a  weakling.  When 
once  writers  begin  to  talk  about  life  as  if  it 
were  a  person  they  are  sure  to  talk  about 
human  beings  as  if  they  were  machines.  The 
best  part  of  Miss  Sinclair's  book  is  about  Emily, 
and  especially  about  her  poems.  She  says 
some  good  things  about  Charlotte,  but  is  in- 
clined to  make  her  a  foil  to  Emily,  a  proceed- 
ing which  Emily  would  have  resented  as  much 
as  anyone. 

We  have  said  that  Charlotte  had  a  desire 
for  a  certain  state  of  being  to  which  love  was 
necessary.  But  Miss  Sinclair  insists  rightly 
that  she  was  not  a  sentimentalist.  Indeed,  if 
Charlotte  was,  or  promised  to  be,  the  greatest 
English  novelist  of  her  time,  it  is  because, 
besides  being  more  strongly  moved  by  experi- 
94 


The  Brontes 

ence  than  her  rivals,  she  is  free  from  that 
vice  of  sentimentality  which  weakened  them. 
Dickens  and  Thackeray,  with  all  their  wider 
and  larger  experience,  were  apt  to  distort  it 
for  their  own  emotional  pleasure  or  for  the 
emotional  pleasure  of  their  readers.  Charlotte 
Bronte  is  sometimes  absurd  from  inexperience, 
but  she  never  did  that.  She  made  up  her 
mind  early  that  life  was  hard,  and  that  she 
could  get  from  it  very  little  of  what  she 
desired.  She  told  herself  that  she  was  a  plain 
woman  who  had  to  work  for  her  living,  and 
that  her  desires  were  not  likely  to  alter  the 
nature  of  the  Universe.  This,  we  suppose, 
is  what  Miss  Sinclair  means  when  she  says 
that  there  was  something  slightly  subservient 
and  consciously  inferior  in  her  attitude  to- 
wards life.  Her  mistake  comes  from  thinking 
of  life  as  a  person.  Towards  real  persons, 
towards  men  and  women,  Charlotte  had  the 
pride  of  Lucifer;  and  it  was  pride  that  kept 
her  from  being  angry  with  things  because  they 
were  not  favourable  to  her  desires.  She  was 
not  subservient  to  life ;  but  she  would  not  lose 
her  temper  with  it  any  more  than  she  would 
lose  her  temper  with  a  baby.  When  she 
moralizes,  as  she  sometimes  does,  in  a  Sunday- 
school  manner,  it  is  not  because  such  moraliz- 
95 


Essays  on  Books 

ing  satisfies  any  part  of  her  mind,  but  because 
she  enjoys  telUng  herself  unpleasant  facts. 
She  never  pretends  to  like  the  hardness  of  life 
or  to  think  it  just  or  reasonable;  she  only 
insists  that  it  is  hard  and  that  it  is  no  use  to 
pretend  otherwise. 

And  it  is  the  same  with  people.  In  Villette 
she  says  of  Paulina  :  "  I  liked  her.  It  is  not 
a  declaration  I  have  often  made  concerning 
my  acquaintance  in  the  course  of  this  book ; 
the  reader  will  bear  with  it  for  once."  Here 
there  is  a  conscious  revolt  against  what  seemed 
to  her  the  ordinary  misrepresentations  of 
fiction.  She  did  not  believe  that  there  was  as 
much  affection  in  real  life  or  as  much  reason 
for  it  as  novels  usually  pretend.  At  any  rate, 
people  in  her  position  did  not  find  the  world 
amiable,  and  she  was  not  going  to  make  any 
pretence  of  loving  it  so  as  to  contrive  a  pretty 
story.  The  curious  thing  is  that  her  proud 
submission  to  the  hardness  of  life  is  more 
determined  in  Villette^  written  after  the  success 
of  Jane  Eyre,  than  in  Jane  Eyre  itself.  At 
the  end  of  Jane  Eyre  she  says :  "  1  know 
what  it  is  to  live  entirely  for  and  with  what  I 
love  best  on  earth.  I  hold  myself  supremely 
blest — blest  beyond  what  language  can  express  ; 
because  I  am  my  husband's  life  as  fully  as  he 
96 


The  Brontes 

is  mine."  Rochester  even  recovered  the  sight 
of  one  eye  and  acknowledged  that  God  had 
tempered  judgment  with  mercy.  In  VUlette 
there  is  neither  mercy  nor  judgment  but 
the  chance  of  a  storm,  the  issue  of  which 
the  reader  can  take  to  be  what  he  chooses. 
"Leave  sunny  imaginations  hope,"  says  the 
writer,  and  we  know  that  her  own  imagination 
is  not  sunny.  "  Madame  Beck  prospered  all 
the  days  of  her  life;  so  did  Pere  Silas. 
Madame  Walravens  fulfilled  her  ninetieth 
year  before  she  died."  There  is  a  happy  end- 
ing for  you  if  you  want  it,  thrown  like  a  bone 
to  a  dog.  Charlotte  Bronte  does  not  believe 
that  happiness  comes  to  those  who  know  best 
what  happiness  might  be.  She  does  not  for  a 
moment  believe  that  Lucy  Snowe  could  have 
had  with  Doctor  John  that  kind  of  happiness 
which  the  Jane  Eyre  of  the  past  had  enjoyed 
with  Rochester.  Doctor  John  throughout 
VUlette  is  treated  as  a  day-dream.  If  he 
begins  to  be  the  hero  of  the  book,  it  is  only 
to  show  that  heroes  are  not  for  Lucy  Snowe, 
however  much  she  may  have  dreamed  of  them. 
And  soon  she  seems  to  console  herself  with 
the  thought  that  heroes  are  heroes  only  to 
heroines.  That,  I  think,  is  the  real  reason 
why  Doctor  John  is  a  failure,  and  not  because, 
G  97 


Essays  on  Books 

as  Miss  Sinclair  says,  Charlotte  is  too  con- 
sciously preoccupied  with  him.  She  had  never 
met  a  man  who  seemed  to  her  like  the  hero  of 
a  novel,  and  when  she  tried  to  draw  one  she 
was  hampered  by  scepticism.  She  keeps  telling 
herself  that  Doctor  John  is  ordinary,  though 
good.  He  would  no  doubt  seem  a  hero  to  a 
woman  who  fell  in  love  with  him  ;  but  Lucy 
Snowe,  like  her  creator,  was  not  the  woman  to 
indulge  herself  in  a  hopeless  passion.  Through- 
out Villette  Charlotte  revolts  against  Doctor 
John  and  against  the  convention  that  would 
make  him  the  chief  character  in  it.  She  is  for 
the  men  and  women  who  do  not  get  happiness 
so  easily  ;  and  they  triumph  in  her  masterpiece, 
not  materially,  but  because  their  griefs  and 
joys  interest  us  more  than  any  mechanically 
contrived  happiness  of  heroes  and  heroines. 

But  though  Lucy  Snowe  is  plain  and  quiet, 
and  though  M.  Emanuel  can  make  himself 
ridiculous,  they  both  have  the  genius  of  their 
creator.  Charlotte  Bronte,  though  she  de- 
spised the  heroes  and  heroines  of  circumstance, 
worshipped  genius,  and  was,  perhaps,  the  only 
English  novelist  who  could  represent  it,  not  by 
telling  us  about  the  wonders  it  achieves,  but 
by  revealing  its  mind  to  us.  Lucy  Snowe  and 
Paul  Emanuel  do  no  wonders;  but  in  them 
98 


The  Brontes 

she  shows  us  genius  without  its  works  ;  and  in 
her  description  of  Rachel  she  no  longer  tries 
to  conceal  her  worship.  Rachel  did  not  know 
that  the  one  woman  in  Europe  of  a  genius 
equal  to  her  own,  and  greater,  was  watching 
her;  and  that  woman  an  English  Miss  whom 
none  of  her  own  admirers  would  have  looked 
at  twice,  a  little  Puritan  who  knew  nothing  of 
the  world  except  by  intuition,  who  hated  the 
Pope,  despised  foreigners,  and  was  ready  to 
believe  all  actresses  wicked.  She  had  been 
told  that  Rachel  was  not  good,  she  says — 

Wicked,  perhaps,  she  is,  but  also  she  is 
strong ;  and  her  strength  has  conquered  beauty, 
has  overcome  grace,  and  bound  both  at  her 
side,  captives  peerlessly  fair,  and  docile  as 
fair.  .  .  ,  Fallen,  insurgent,  banished,  she 
remembers  the  heaven  where  she  rebelled. 
Heaven's  light,  following  her  exile,  pierces  its 
confines,  and  discloses  its  forlorn  remoteness. 

And  then  at  the  end,  in  her  delight  of  under- 
standing another  genius  with  her  own,  she  for- 
gets all  about  the  rumoured  wickedness  : — 

I  had  seen  acting  before,  but  never  anything 
like  this — never  anything  which  astonished 
Hope  and  hushed  Desire ;  which  outstripped 
Impulse  and  paled  Conception  ;  which,  instead 
of  merely  irritating  imagination  with  the 
thought  of  what  might  be  done,  at  the  same 
99 


Essays  on  Books 

time  fevering  the  nerves  because  it  was  not 
done,  disclosed  power  like  a  deep,  swollen 
winter  river  thundering  in  cataract,  and  bear- 
ing the  soul,  like  a  leaf,  on  the  steep  and  steely 
sweep  of  its  descent. 

Like  another  Puritan,  she  is  carried  away  by 
her  Lucifer  and  reveals  herself  and  her  own 
rebellion  in  her  description  of  Rachel's.  It 
was  not  merely  common  inadequate  art  but 
common  inadequate  life  also  which  irritated 
her  imagination  with  the  thought  of  what 
might  be  done,  at  the  same  time  fevering  the 
nerves  because  it  was  not  done ;  and  in  all  her 
books  there  is  the  conflict  between  her  desires 
and  her  determination  not  to  mistake  reality. 
She  had  those  thoughts  which  wander  through 
eternity ;  she  had  her  own  conception  of  a 
heaven  which  she  would  not  give  up  for  any 
conventional  idea  of  happiness  and  by  which 
she  measured  all  earthly  things  and  people. 
But  what  made  her  and  her  art  remarkable 
was  her  determination  not  to  lose  herself  in 
dreams  of  that  heaven,  not  to  exchange  ugly 
truth  for  any  pretty  illusion.  We  wonder 
that  she  should  have  come  out  of  that 
Yorkshire  parsonage,  as  if  she  wrote  by  a 
miracle  about  things  she  had  never  seen  or 
known.  But  it  was  the  contrast  between  her 
100 


The  Brontes 

real  life  and  what  she  desired  that  made  her 
art.  Everything  good  in  it  is  taken  from 
external  or  internal  experience ;  there  is  the 
dark  foil  of  reality  to  all  her  dreams.  She  is 
the  most  lyrical  of  our  novelists,  because  every- 
thing that  happened  to  her  moved  her  to 
emotion  through  the  contrast  between  what 
was  and  what  she  desired.  The  plot  is  always 
made  by  the  adventures  of  her  own  soul,  and 
they  are  stranger  than  any  adventures  of 
romantic  heroes  in  outlandish  countries. 
When  first  Jane  Eyre  appeared  there  was 
resentment  both  of  men  and  of  women  that  a 
woman  should  speak  so  frankly  of  the  adven- 
tures of  her  soul.  The  world  was  used  to  a 
Rachel  telling  everything  about  herself  and 
women  on  the  stage ;  it  was  not  used  to  an 
English  governess,  the  daughter  of  a  country 
parson,  making  the  same  revelations  with  more 
frankness  and  greater  power.  It  was  lawful 
for  a  woman  to  describe  how  women  acted  and 
spoke  when  in  love  with  men ;  it  was  not 
lawful  for  her  to  expose  the  mind  of  a  woman 
who  was  in  love  with  love  itself.  We  enjoy  the 
dreams  of  young  men  about  love,  especially 
in  lyrical  poetry  ;  but  here  was  a  girl  who, 
with  primeval  innocence,  not  merely  expressed 
her  dreams  in  poetry  but  represented  them  in 
lOI 


Essays  on  Books 

fiction,  showing  the  woman  who  dreamed  them 
so  vividly  that  every  one  knew  she  was  real. 
Hence  the  Quarterly  reviewer,  he  or  she,  was 
determined  to  believe  either  that  she  was  not 
real  or  that  she  was  not  a  fair  specimen  of  her 
kind ;  a  man  must  have  written  the  book,  or, 
if  not  a  man,  a  woman  who,  for  some  reason, 
had  long  forfeited  the  society  of  her  own  sex. 

That  reviewer  knew  nothing  of  the  other 
side  of  Charlotte  Bronte,  the  bravery  that 
went  with  her  innocence ;  and  he  or  she  was  as 
far  out  as  the  reviewer  who  conjectured  that 
In  Memoriam  must  have  been  written  by 
the  widow  of  a  military  man.  Charlotte 
Bronte  remarks  that  when  the  world  was 
younger  and  haler  than  now  moral  trials  were 
a  deeper  mystery  still.  "Perhaps  in  all  the 
land  of  Israel  there  was  but  one  Saul — certainly 
but  one  David  to  soothe  or  comprehend  him." 
So  when  she  wrote  women  were  a  deeper 
mystery  even  than  they  are  now ;  the  idea 
that  they  should  tell  the  secrets  of  their  own 
hearts,  or  had  any  secrets  to  tell,  had  not 
existed,  perhaps,  since  the  time  of  Sappho. 
Perhaps  in  the  whole  of  England  there  was 
but  one  Charlotte  Bronte,  certainly  but  one 
Emily  to  comprehend  her.  It  was  the  Bronte 
family  that  made  each  of  them  write  with  that 
1 02 


The  Brontes 

wonderful  frankness  and  innocence.  There 
were  two  girls,  if  not  three,  who  knew  the 
secrets  of  each  other's  hearts  and  knew  where 
their  own  were  safe  from  misunderstanding. 
Their  dreadful  home  was  their  fortress  against 
the  world,  to  which  they  returned  to  renew 
their  strength  in  communion  with  each  other. 
For  Emily  it  was  the  world ;  and  everything 
outside  was  a  nightmare  of  unreality.  In 
Wuthering  Heights  we  seem  to  see  her  mind 
lost  in  that  nightmare  and  fighting  with 
it,  but  never  losing  courage.  So  she  fought 
with  death  itself;  and  for  Charlotte  the 
memory  of  her  death  and  the  others  made  the 
outside  world  always  lonely  and  inhospitable. 
"The  spirit  was  inexorable  to  the  flesh,"  she 
said  of  Emily  after  she  was  dead.  She  herself 
could  make  terms  with  the  world,  but  they 
were  her  own  terms.  She  conquered  it,  and 
cared  so  little  for  her  conquest  that  she 
married  her  father's  curate,  not  having  found 
either  Rochester  or  Paul  Emanuel  in  real  life. 
We  must  not  suppose  that  she  took  him 
because  she  could  find  no  one  better.  That 
would  be  a  gi'oss  misunderstanding.  She  loved 
him  as  much  as  she  could  love  any  reality  ;  but 
it  was  only  by  the  conquest  of  herself  that  she 
was  able  to  love  an  ordinary  man  at  all. 
103 


Dostoevsky        <s>       o       .s>       o        «^ 

THE  novels  of  Dostoevsky  discover  a 
strange  world  to  us,  in  which  people  talk 
and  act  like  no  one  that  we  have  ever  met, 
yet  we  do  not  read  them  because  we  wish  to 
hear  about  these  strange  Russian  people, 
so  unlike  ourselves.  Rather  we  read  them 
because  they  remind  us  of  what  we  had  for- 
gotten about  ourselves,  as  a  scent  may  suddenly 
remind  us  of  some  place  or  scene  not  re- 
membered since  childhood.  And  as  we  have 
no  doubt  about  the  truth  of  the  memories 
recalled  by  a  scent,  so  we  have  none  about 
Dostoevsky's  truth.  It  is  strange  like  those 
memories  of  childhood,  but  only  because  it  has 
been  so  long  sleeping  in  our  minds.  He  has 
no  need  to  prove  it ;  he  presents  it  for  our 
recognition,  and  we  recognize  it  at  once,  how- 
ever contrary  it  may  be  to  all  that  we  are 
accustomed  to  believe  about  ourselves. 

The  strangeness  of  Dostoevsky's  novels  lies 

in  his  method,  which  is  unlike  that  of  other 

novelists  because  his  interest  is  different  from 

theirs.     The  novel  of  pure  plot  is  all  concerned 

104 


Dostoevsky 

with  success  or  failure ;  the  hero  has  some  task 
to  perform,  and  we  read  to  discover  whether 
he  succeeds  in  performing  it.  But  even  in 
novels  where  character  is  more  considered  it  is 
still  the  interest  of  failure  and  success  which 
usually  makes  the  plot.  The  hero,  for  instance, 
falls  in  love,  and  the  plot  forms  round  this 
love ;  or  he  is  married,  and  there  is  a  suspense 
about  his  happiness  or  unhappiness.  But  in 
the  greatest  of  Dostoevsky ^s  books,  such  as 
The  Brothers  Karamazov  or  Tlie  Idiot,  the 
interest  is  not  in  the  happiness  or  un- 
happiness of  the  hero ;  for  to  Dostoevsky 
happiness  and  unhappiness  are  external  things, 
and  he  is  not  concerned  even  with  this  kind  of 
failure  or  success.  He  has  so  firm  a  belief  in 
the  existence  of  the  soul,  and  with  it  a  faith  so 
strong  in  the  order  of  the  universe,  that  he 
applies  no  final  tests  whatever  to  this  life. 
Plot  with  most  novelists  is  an  effort  to  make 
life  seem  more  conclusive  than  it  is ;  and  that 
is  one  of  the  reasons  why  we  like  a  firm  plot  in 
a  novel.  With  its  tests  and  judgments  and 
results  it  produces  an  illusion  of  certainty 
agreeable  to  our  weakness  of  faith ;  but 
Dostoevsky  needs  no  illusion  of  certainty,  and 
gives  none.  He  had  a  faith  independent  of 
happiness  and  even  of  the  state  of  his  own 
105 


Essays  on  Books 

soul.  Life  had  poured  unhappiness  upon  him 
so  that  he  knew  the  worst  of  it  from  his  own 
experience ;  yet  we  can  tell  from  his  books 
that  he  knew  also  a  peace  of  thought  compared 
with  which  his  own  miseries  were  unreal  to 
him.  In  that  he  differs  from  Tolstoy,  who  saw 
this  peace  of  thought  in  the  distance  and  could 
not  reach  it.  Tolstoy  therefore  conceived  of 
life  as  an  inevitable  discord  between  will  and 
conviction,  and  tried  to  impose  the  impossible 
on  mankind  as  he  tried  to  impose  it  upon 
himself,  judging  them  with  the  severity  of  his 
self-judgments.  His  books  are  full  of  his  own 
pursuit  of  certainty  and  his  own  half-failure 
and  half-success.  He  still  makes  happiness  the 
test,  even  though  he  knows  that  the  noblest 
of  men  cannot  attain  to  it ;  for  his  own  un- 
happiness was  caused  by  the  conflict  in  his 
mind  between  will  and  conviction.  But  in 
Dostoevsky  this  conflict  had  ceased.  He  was 
not  happy,  but  he  was  not  torn  by  the  desire 
for  happiness ;  nor  did  he  test  his  own  soul  or 
the  souls  of  others  by  their  happiness.  His 
faith  in  the  soul  was  so  great  that  he  saw 
'4t  independent  of  circumstance,  almost  in- 
dependent of  its  own  manifestations  in  action. 
For  in  these  manifestations  there  is  always  the 
alloy  of  circumstance,  of  the  passions  of  the 
1 06 


Dostoevsky 

flesh,  or  of  good  or  evil  fortune ;  and  he  tried 
to  see  the  soul  free  of  this.  He  did  not  judge 
men  by  the  diversities  which  outward  things 
seem  to  impose  on  them  ;  for  him  the  soul  was 
more  real  than  all  these  diversities,  and  they 
only  interested  him  for  their  power  of  revealing 
or  obscuring  it.  Therefore  his  object  in  his 
novels  is  to  reveal  the  soul,  not  to  pass  any 
judgments  upon  men  nor  to  tell  us  how  they 
fare  in  this  world;  and  this  object  makes  his 
peculiar  method.  He  does  not  try  to  show  us 
souls  free  from  their  bodies  or  from  circum- 
stance, for  to  do  that  would  be  contrary  to 
his  own  experience  and  his  own  faith.  Rather 
he  shows  them  tormented  and  mistranslated, 
even  to  themselves,  but  in  such  a  way  that  we 
see  the  reality  beyond  the  torments  and  the 
mistranslations.  His  characters  drift  together 
and  fall  into  long  wayward  conversations  that 
have  nothing  to  do  with  any  events  in  the 
book.  They  quarrel  about  nothing  ;  they  have 
no  sense  of  shame ;  they  behave  intolerably,  so 
that  we  know  we  should  hate  them  in  real 
life.  But,  as  we  read,  we  do  not  hate  them, 
for  we  recognize  ourselves — not  indeed  in  their 
words  and  behaviour,  but  in  what  they  reveal 
through  these.  They  have  an  extreme  frank- 
ness which  may  be  in  the  Russian  character 
107 


Essays  on  Books 

but  which  is  also  part  of  Dostoevsky's  method, 
for  the  characters  of  other  Russian  novelists 
are  not  so  frank  as  his.  He  makes  them  talk 
and  act  so  as  to  reveal  themselves,  and  for 
no  other  purpose  whatever.  Yet  they  reveal 
themselves  unconsciously,  and  their  frankness, 
though  surprising,  is  not  incredible. 

But  we,  accustomed  to  novels  concerned  with 
failure  and  success,  and  with  plots  formed  upon 
that  concern,  are  bewildered  by  Dostoevsky"'s 
method ;  and  even  he  is  a  little  bewildered  by 
it.  He  never  quite  learned  how  to  tell  his 
own  kind  of  story,  a  story  in  which  all  out- 
ward events  are  subordinate  to  the  changes 
and  manifestations  of  the  soul.  Even  in  The 
Brothers  Karamazov  there  is  a  plot,  made  out 
of  the  murder  of  old  Karamazov,  which  seems 
to  be  imposed  upon  the  real  interest  of  the 
book  as  the  unintelligible  plot  of  Little 
Dorrit  is  imposed  upon  the  real  interest  of 
that  masterpiece.  And  in  The  Idiot  events 
are  so  causeless  and  have  so  little  effect  that 
we  cannot  remember  them.  The  best  plan  is 
not  to  try  to  remember  them,  for  they  matter 
very  little ;  the  book  is  about  the  souls  of 
men  and  women,  and  where  the  construction 
is  clumsy  it  is  only  because  Dostoevsky  is 
impatient  to  tell  us  what  he  has  to  tell. 
io8 


Dostoevsky 

Those  who  believe  that  the  soul  is  only  an 
illusion — and  there  are  many  who  believe  this 
without  knowing  it — will  be  surprised  to  find 
how  much  truth  Dostoevsky  has  discovered 
through  his  error.  Whether  his  faith  was 
right  or  wrong,  it  certainly  served  him  well 
as  a  novelist,  and  so  did  his  experience.  No 
modern  writer  has  been  so  well  acquainted 
with  evil  and  misery  as  he  was.  Other  novelists 
write  about  them  as  moving  exceptions  in  life ; 
he  wrote  about  them  because,  in  his  experience, 
they  were  the  rule.  Other  novelists  write 
about  them  because  they  have  a  quarrel  with 
life  or  with  society,  or  with  particular  institu- 
tions ;  but  he  has  no  quarrel  with  anything  ; 
there  is  neither  hatred  in  him,  nor  righteous 
indignation,  nor  despair.  He  had  suffered  from 
Government  as  much  as  any  man  in  the  world, 
yet  he  never  saw  it  as  a  hideous  abstraction,  and 
its  crimes  and  errors  were  for  him  only  the 
crimes  and  errors  of  men  like  himself. 

We  hate  men  when  they  seem  no  longer  men 
to  us,  when  we  see  nothing  in  them  but 
tendencies  which  we  abhor ;  and  a  novelist 
who  expresses  his  hatred  of  tendencies  in  his 
characters  deprives  them  of  life  and  makes 
them  uninteresting  to  all  except  those  who 
share  his  hatred.  Even  Tolstoy  makes  some 
109 


Essays  on  Books 

of  his  characters  lifeless  through  hatred ;  but 
Dostoevsky  hates  no  one,  for  behind  every 
tendency  he  looks  for  the  soul,  and  the 
tendency  only  interests  him  because  of  the 
soul  that  is  concealed  or  betrayed  by  it. 
Thus  his  wicked  people,  and  they  abound,  are 
never  introduced  into  his  books  either  to 
gratify  his  hatred  of  them  or  to  make  a  plot 
with  their  wickedness.  He  is  as  much  con- 
cerned with  their  souls  as  with  the  souls  of  his 
saints,  Alyosha  and  Prince  Myshkin.  lago 
seems  to  be  drawn  from  life,  but  only  from 
external  observation ;  we  never  feel  that 
Shakespeare  has  been  lago  himself,  or  has 
deduced  him  from  possibilities  in  himself. 
But  Dostoevsky 's  worst  characters  are  like 
Hamlet.  He  knows  things  about  them  that 
he  could  only  know  about  himself,  and  they 
live  through  his  sympathy,  not  merely  through 
his  observation.  He  makes  no  division  of  men 
into  sheep  and  goats — not  even  that  subtle 
division,  common  in  the  best  novels,  by  which 
the  sheep  are  more  real  than  the  goats.  For 
him  all  men  have  more  likeness  to  each  other 
than  unlikeness,  for  they  all  have  souls;  and 
because  he  is  always  aware  of  the  soul  in  them 
he  has  a  Christian  sense  of  their  equality.  It 
is  not  merely  rich  and  poor  or  clever  or  stupid 
no 


Dostoevsky 

that  are  equal  to  him,  but  even  good  and  bad. 
He  treats  the  drunkard  Lebedyev  with  respect, 
and,  though  his  books  contain  characters  as 
absurd  as  any  in  Dickens,  he  does  not  intro- 
duce them,  like  Dickens,  to  make  fun  of  them, 
but  because  he  is  interested  in  the  manner 
in  which  their  absurdities  mistranslate  them. 
Nor  is  the  soul  made  different  for  him  by  sex, 
for  that  is  only  a  difference  of  the  body.  So  he  / 
does  not  insist  on  femininity  in  his  women  ;  he 
knows  them,  but  he  knows  them  as  human 
beings  like  men  ;  and  he  is  interested  in  sexual 
facts  not  as  they  affect  his  own  passions  but 
as  they  affect  the  soul.  He,  like  his  hero 
Myshkin,  was  an  epileptic,  and  what  he  tells 
us  of  Myshkin's  attitude  towards  women  may 
have  been  true  of  himself.  But  if  that  is  so, 
his  own  lack  of  appetite,  like  the  deafness  of 
Beethoven,  made  his  art  more  profound  and 
spiritual ;  he  makes  no  appeal  to  the  passions 
of  his  readers,  as  Beethoven  in  his  later  works 
makes  none  to  the  mere  sense  of  sound. 

He  was  an  artist  purified  by  suffering  as 
saints  are  purified  by  it;  for  through  it  he 
attained  to  that  complete  disinterestedness 
which  is  as  necessary  to  the  artist  as  to  the 
saint.  Whenever  a  man  sees  people  and 
things  in  relation  only  to  his  own  personal 
III 


Essays  on  Books 

i wants  and  appetites  he  cannot  use  them  as 
subject-matter  for  art.  Dostoevsky  learnt  to 
free  everything  and  everybody  from  this  rela- 
tion more  completely,  perhaps,  than  any  writer 
known  to  us.  Not  even  vanity  or  fear,  nor 
any  theory  begotten  of  them,  perverted  his 
view  of  human  life.  In  his  art  at  any  rate 
he  achieved  that  complete  liberation  which  is 
aimed  at  by  the  wisdom  of  the  East ;  and  his 
heroes  exhibit  it  in  their  conduct.  Myshkin 
would  be  a  man  of  no  account  in  our  world, 
but  Christ  might  have  chosen  him  for  one  of 
his  Apostles ;  any  Western  novelist,  drawing 
such  a  character,  would  have  made  him  unreal 
by  insisting  upon  his  goodness  and  by  display- 
ing it  only  in  external  actions,  as  saints  in  most 
European  pictures  are  to  be  recognized  only  by 
a  halo  and  a  look  of  silly  sanctity.  We  fail 
with  such  characters  because  we  should  not 
recognize  them  if  we  met  them  in  real  life,  and 
because  we  do  not  even  wish  to  be  like  them 
ourselves.  They  represent  an  ideal  imposed  on 
us  long  ago  from  the  East,  and  now  only 
faintly  and  conventionally  remembered.  We 
test  everybody  by  some  kind  of  success  in  this 
life,  even  if  it  be  only  the  success  of  a  just  self- 
satisfaction.  But  Myshkin  has  not  even  that ; 
he  is  unconscious  of  his  own  goodness,  and  of 

112 


Dostoevsky 

the  badness  of  other  men.  People  who  meet 
him  are  impatient  with  him  and  call  him  "  the 
idiot "  because  he  seems  to  be  purposeless  and 
defenceless ;  but  we  do  not  feel  that  the 
novelist  has  afflicted  them  with  incredible 
blindness,  for  we  know,  as  we  read,  that  we  too 
should  call  Myshkin  an  idiot  if  we  met  him. 
His  understanding  has  never  been  trained  by 
competition  or  defence,  but  that  is  the  reason 
why  now  and  then  it  surprises  every  one  by  its 
profundity ;  for  he  understands  men's  minds 
because,  like  Dostoevsky  himself,  he  does  not 
see  them  in  relation  to  his  own  wants,  and 
because  his  disinterestedness  makes  them  put 
off  all  disguise  before  him. 

"  Dear  Prince,''  some  one  says  to  him,  "  it's 
not  easy  to  reach  paradise  on  earth ;  but  you 
reckon  on  finding  it.  Paradise  is  a  difficult 
matter.  Prince — much  more  difficult  than  it 
seems  to  your  good  heart."  But  Myshkin's 
heart  is  not  good  because  it  cherishes  illusions ; 
he  does  not  expect  to  find  paradise  on  earth, 
and  he  does  not  like  people  because  he  thinks 
them  better  than  they  are.  Seeing  clearly 
what  they  are,  he  likes  even  the  worst  of  them 
in  spite  of  it ;  and  to  read  Dostoevsky's  books 
throws  us  for  the  time  into  Myshkin's  state  of 
mind.     When   we   are   confronted    with    some 

H  113 


Essays  on  Books 

fearful  wickedness,  even  when  we  read  about  it 
in  the  newspapers,  it  shakes  our  faith  in  life 
and  makes  it  seem  a  nightmare  in  which 
ordinary  comfortable  reality  has  suddenly 
turned  into  horror.  But  in  Dostoevsky's  books 
the  horror  of  the  nightmare  suddenly  turns  to 
a  happy  familiar  beauty.  He  shows  us  wicked- 
ness worse  than  any  we  had  ever  imagined, 
wickedness  which,  if  we  met  with  it  in  real  life, 
would  make  us  believe  in  human  monsters  with- 
out souls ;  and  then,  like  music  rising  through 
vthe  discord  of  madness,  he  shows  us  a  soul, 
like  our  own,  behind  that  wickedness.  And  we 
believe  in  the  one  as  we  have  believed  in  the 
other;  for  we  feel  that  a  man  is  telling  us 
about  life  who  has  ceased  to  fear  it,  and  that 
his  faith,  tested  by  the  suffering  which  he 
reveals  in  his  books,  is  more  to  be  trusted  than 
our  own  experience. 


114 


The  Promise  of  Keats  -^       o       <y^ 

MR.  BRIDGES'  essay  on  Keats  was 
written  more  than  twenty  years  ago, 
and  he  has  since  revised  it.  It  is  one  of  the  best 
essays  in  our  language  upon  a  great  poet,  or, 
rather,  upon  his  poetry  ;  for  Mr,  Bridges  shows 
little  psychological  curiosity  about  Keats  in  it. 
He  gives  us  an  analysis  of  Endymion  which 
should  be  read  by  every  one  who  wishes  to  enjoy 
that  work.  About  all  the  poems  of  which  he 
speaks  he  has  something  simple  and  true  and 
precise  to  say;  yet  I  am  not  satisfied.  Or, 
rather,  I  wish  to  add  something  to  what  he  has 
said  and  to  differ  a  little  from  what  he  implies, 
if  not  from  what  he  asserts, 

Keats,  he  says  at  the  beginning  of  his  essay, 
"  was  smitten  down  in  his  youth,  in  the  very 
maturing  of  his  powers,  which,  having  already 
produced  work  of  almost  unrivalled  beauty, 
held  a  promise  of  incredible  things."  There 
1  both  agree  and  dissent,  I  do  not  believe 
115 


Essays  on  Books 

that  Keats  died  in  the  very  maturing  of  his 
powers.  Rather,  when  he  was  overcome  by 
disease,  there  was  a  change  working  in  him 
which  made  him  a  beginner  again ;  and  in  this 
change  was  the  promise  of  incredible  things. 
He  was  the  prize  student  among  English  poets, 
though  he  won  no  prize  in  his  lifetime.  No 
one  ever  did  such  student  work  as  Hyperion ; 
and  he  did  not  finish  it  because  it  was  student 
work.  It  even  gave  him  a  disgust  of  his 
master,  Milton.  Mr.  Bridges  quotes  him  on 
this  point.  "I  have  but  lately  stood  on  my 
guard  against  Milton.  Life  to  him  would  be 
death  to  me.'"  Even  in  the  great  Odes  there 
are  marks  of  the  student,  passages  of  delighted 
virtuosity  that  remind  one  of  the  student 
drawings  of  Mr.  John,  In  the  Ode  to  the 
Nightingale  he  is  further  from  natural  speech 
than  Shelley  in  his  best  lyrics ;  he  is  producing 
a  splendid  work  of  art  and  enjoying  the  sense 
that  he  is  doing  so. 

To  cease  upon  the  midnight  with  no  pain. 

That  is  the  phrase  of  a  wonderful  student ;  but 
Shelley  wrote  poetry  more  naturally  than  he 
wrote  a  letter ;  and  Keats  did  not  understand 
or  admire  this  freedom  of  his.  He  thought 
that  Shelley  did  not  pay  enough  respect  to 
Ii6 


The  Promise  of  Keats 

poetry  and  told  him  to  curb  his  magnanimity, 
be  more  of  an  artist,  and  load  every  rift  with 
ore.  Those  are  modern  words ;  they  might 
have  been  said  by  an  art  student  of  to-day ; 
and  Keats  is  the  first  modern  art  student 
known  to  us.  That,  no  doubt,  was  why  he 
irritated  not  only  dull,  peevish  men  like  Giffbrd, 
but  also  men  of  the  world  like  Byron,  He 
seemed  to  them  a  narrow  little,  impudent 
Cockney ;  and  he  had  the  modern  impudence 
and  frivolity  of  manner,  the  modern  eagerness 
for  all  kinds  of  ideas  and  audacity  in  expressing 
them.  He  was  at  home  with  ideas  long  before 
he  was  at  home  with  people ;  one  c£vn  imagine 
him,  now,  in  a  studio  in  Chelsea,  slipshod  and 
restless,  shy  yet  talkative,  and  with  a  cigarette 
always  loosely  held  between  his  lips.  So  he 
has  been  the  favourite  poet  of  art  students  and 
of  clever  young  poets  who  are  learning  their 
craft.  He  writes  as  they  would  like  to  write ; 
they  see  how  magnificently  he  brings  things 
off,  how  there  is  the  scent  of  poetry  itself  in 
the  "  magic  casements,"  and  "  the  large  utter- 
ance of  the  early  gods,"  and  "  the  music 
yearning  like  a  god  in  pain,"  and  "  the  besieg- 
ing wind's  uproar."  It  is  of  such  phrases  that 
the  young  poet  dreams ;  they  are  poetry  to 
him ;  and  he  who  can  make  them  lives  a  life 
117 


Essays  on  Books 

that  is  worth  living.  Keats  thought  that 
himself ;  words  were  to  him  a  delicious  material ; 
and  he  seems  to  feel  them  with  delicate  fingers, 
to  give  them  quality  with  his  touch  as  Chardin 
gave  quality  to  paint.  All  that  feeling  is  ex- 
pressed consciously  in  his  fragment  of  an  Ode 
to  Maia : — 

Mother  of  Hermes  !  and  still  youthful  Maia ! 

May  I  sing  to  thee 
As  thou  wast  hymned  on  the  shores  of  Baiae? 

Or  may  I  woo  thee 
In  earlier  Sicilian  ?  or  thy  smiles 
Seek  as  they  once  were  sought,  in  Grecian  isles, 
By  bards  who  died  content  on  pleasant  sward, 
Leaving  great  verse  unto  a  little  clan  ? 
O,  give  me  their  old  vigour,  and  unheard 
Save  of  the  quiet  primrose,  and  the  span 

Of  heaven  and  few  ears. 
Rounded  by  thee,  my  song  should  die  away 

Content  as  theirs. 
Rich  in  the  simple  worship  of  a  day. 

It  is  rounded  like  a  piece  on  the  violin  played 
by  a  master,  and  the  delight  of  rounding  it 
seemed  then  to  Keats  the  best  thing  in  life. 

Because  he  did  this  wonderful  student  work 
we  are  apt  to  think  of  him  as  one  whose  career 
was  determined.  He  means  to  us  the  Ode  to 
the  Nightingale  and  odes  unwritten  of  the 
same  kind.  His  furthest  point  of  progress  is 
La  belle  dame  sans  merci  or  the  fragment  of 
Il8 


The  Promise  of  Keats 

The  Eve   of  St,    Mark ;   and    who   could   go 
further    than    that?    Yet    these    are    not   his 
furthest  point  of  progress,  and  it  is  not  they 
that  hold    the    promise   of  incredible    things. 
He  could  not  have  done  better  that  way  ;  but 
he  was  starting  on  a  different  way  foreshadowed 
in  The  Fall  of  Hyperion.     Many  things  led  him 
into  it ;  already  in  1818  he  had  said  that  he 
would  turn  all  his  soul  to  the  love  of  philo- 
sophy ;   and   one   can    see   in   his  letters    how 
strong  this   lo.ve    was   in    him.      There    is  no 
opposition,  as  Mr.  Bridges  points  out,  "  between 
his  true  instinct  for  ideal  philosophy  and  his 
luxurious  poetry  (which  seems  rather  its  young 
expression),"  and  for  a  time  he  sought  a  philo- 
sophical justification  for  that. luxurious  poetry. 
But  philosophy  made  him  think  about  his  art, 
made  him  desire  to  enrich  it  with  the  whole  of 
himself.     There  came  a  time  when  it  seemed 
to  him   that    in  his  romantic  poetry   he   was 
playing  a  game ;  and  in  the  Fall  of  Hyperion 
he  expresses  the  same  mood  that  is  expressed 
by  the  young  Shakespeare  at  the  end  of  Love's 
Labours  Lost.      The  Veiled  Shadow  says   to 

him : — 

Thou  hast  felt 

What  'tis  to  die  and  live  again  before 

Thy  fated  hour  ;  that  thou  hadst  power  to  do  so 

Is  thine  own  safety. 

119 


Essays  on  Books 

This  is  the  language  of  conversion,  and  the 
Shadow  proceeds  to  tell  him  how  he  can  attain 
to  salvation  both  in  life  and  in  art — 

"  None  can  usurp  this  height,"  returned  that  shade, 

"  But  those  to  whom  the  miseries  of  the  world 

Are  misery,  and  will  not  let  them  rest. 

All  else  who  find  a  haven  in  the  world. 

Where  they  may  thoughtless  sleep  away  their  days, 

If  by  a  chance  into  this  fane  they  come, 

Rot  on  the  pavement  where  thou  rottedst  half. 

That  is  to  say  the  poet,  the  artist,  who  sees  in 
life  nothing  but  material  for  his  art,  ceases  to 
be  even  a  poet,  an  artist,  repeats  his  own  youth 
when  he  is  past  it,  and  rots  away  in  the  haven 
he  has  made  for  himself.  The  dreamer  and 
the  poet  are  distinct — 

Diverse,  sheer  opposite,  antipodes, 

The  one  pours  out  a  balm  upon  the  world, 

Theother  vexes  it. 

So  his  masterpieces  seemed  to  Keats  mere 
dreaming.  He  had  half  unconsciously  ex- 
pressed in  them  moods  simpler  than  he  actually 
experienced,  moods  which  he  assumed  so  that 
he  might  simplify  the  problems  of  his  difficult 
art.  Now  he  was  no  longer  content  to  do  so ; 
his  desire  was  to  write  poetry  with  all  his 
faculties  and  to  enrich  it  with  all  his  experience, 
whether  that  seemed  poetical  in  itself  or  prosaic. 

120 


The  Promise  of  Keats 

It  is  strange  how  classical  and  romantic 
mean  the  same  error  when  they  express  a 
defect  of  art.  They  mean  a  refusal  of  experi- 
ence so  that  art  may  be  made  easy,  as  if  the 
essence  of  art  were  the  choice  of  experience  and 
not  the  transfiguration  of  it.  Keats  saw  that, 
as  a  romantic  poet,  he  had  been  fastidiously 
choosing  experience,  and  that  at  two  removes. 
He  had  dreamed  about  the  past  as  something 
that  he  could  experience  aesthetically.  He 
sees  the  figures  on  a  Grecian  Urn  removed 
out  of  time,  freed  from  anxiety  and  mis- 
chance— '■ 

Fair  Youth,  beneath  the  trees,  thou  canst  not  leave 
Thy  song,  nor  ever  can  those  trees  be  bare ; 
Bold  Lover,  never,  never  canst  thou  kiss, 
Though  winning  near  the  goal — yet,  do  not  grieve  ; 
She    cannot    fade,    though    thou    hast    not   thy 
bliss. 
For  ever  wilt  thou  love,  and  she  be  fair. 

When  he  wrote  this  he  envied  this  perfect 
unreality — it  seemed  to  him  better  than  hap- 
hazard hand-to-mouth  reality,  as  all  art  seemed 
to  him  better  than  life  ;  and  he  would  turn 
away  from  the  present  to  the  beautiful  dumb- 
show  of  the  past  that  he  could  watch  from  a 
distance,  to  lovers  who  did  nothing  but  love 
and  for  whom  love  was  all  passionate  gestures. 
121 


Essays  on  Books 

Between  him  and  the  subject-matter  of  his  art 
there  was  a  gulf  like  that  between  the  audience 
and  the  stage,  and  he  did  not  look  at  the  rest 
of  the  audience.  His  eyes  were  fixed  upon 
those  figures  of  passion  who  had  no  life  outside 
their  passion,  and  whose  passion  therefore  was 
itself  unreal.  He  tried  to  live  himself  in  their 
heaven,  which  was  not  a  heaven  of  pure  joy, 
but  of  detachment  from  the  struggle  for  life 
and  from  all  ideas  connected  with  it. 

Mr.  Bridges  points  out  how  in  the  Epistle 
to  John  Hamilton  Reynolds  Keats  rebels 
against  the  ideas  which  the  struggle  for  life 
fosters  in  the  mind  of  man.  He  wishes  to  see 
the  beauty  of  the  visible  world  simply,  and  to 
have  his  ideas  controlled  by  it,  as  if  they  were 
dreams  caused  by  circumstances — 

O  that  our  dreamings  all,  of  sleep  or  wake, 
Would  all  their  colours  from  the  sunset  take  : 
From  something  of  material  sublime, 
Rather  than  shadow  our  own  soul's  day-time 
In  the  dark  void  of  night. 

He  wished  to  be  passive  to  beauty,  even  if  it 
were  unmeaning,  rather  than  active  in  his  own 
version  of  life  as  it  happened  to  him  ;  and  that 
is  the  romantic  attitude  always. 

But  he  discovered  that,  while  he  had  been 
watching   love   and  writing  of  it  thus  in  the 
122 


The  Promise  of  Keats 

past,  he  did  not  know  what  love  was.  Mr. 
Bridges  speaks  of  his  failure  in  the  delineation 
of  human  passion  and  charges  him  with  a  lack 
of  true  insight  into  it,  "  which  may  have  been 
due  to  the  absence  of  awakening  experience." 
He  speaks,  too,  of  his  superficial  and  unworthy 
treatment  of  his  ideal  female  characters.  It  is 
true  that  they  are  apt  to  be  "  pusses,"  Cockney 
young  ladies  whom  one  might  take  for  an 
outing;  and  Keats  himself  fell  in  love  with  a 
"  puss."  But,  having  done  so,  he  discovered 
what  love  really  was — not  a  matter  of  gestures 
and  music,  not  something  that  transported 
him  from  the  audience  on  to  the  stage,  but 
something  that  troubled  the  whole  of  his  body 
and  soul.  It  was  not  a  duet  in  which  the 
perfect  concord,  whether  of  sorrow  or  joy, 
overcame  all  irrelevant  facts ;  rather,  it  kept 
all  the  imperfection,  misgiving,  and  discord  of 
reality  and  heightened  them.  He  found  that 
by  the  mere  process  of  loving  he  could  not  pass 
into  the  world  of  the  Eve  of  St.  Agnes ;  there 
were  still  two  separate  human  beings,  and  the 
other  was  not  ready  to  sing  the  part  he  had 
dreamed  for  her. 

Out    of    this    discovery    he    made   strange 
poetry,  poetry   that  has  in  it  the  promise  of 
incredible  things.     In  the  Ode  to  Fanny  and 
123 


Essays  on  Books 

the  Lines  to  Fanny  he  shows  us  that  he  was 
indeed  awakened  by  experience,  frightened  by 
a  love  that  began  to  seem,  not  freedom, 
but  slavery.  He  saw  that  he  was  surrender- 
ing himself  to  another,  and  that  other  not 
purely  a  lover  but  herself,  untransfigured 
by  love.  He  saw  the  slave  not  of  an  angel 
of  romance,  but  of  a  woman  with  all  the 
haphazard,  unredeemed  prose  of  life  still  in 
her.  Fanny  Brawne  was  an  individual,  not 
a  type;  but  he  was  still  bound  to  her,  and 
to  the  hard  facts  in  her  that  he  could  not 
love  for  themselves.  *In  the  Ode  to  Fanny 
he  is  tormented  by  jealousy.  He  knows 
that  she  is  a  minx,  and  she  is  going  to 
a  dance  without  him,  where  she  will  flirt; 
there  are  all  the  trivial  ignominies  of  in- 
fatuation, yet  he  transforms  them  in  his 
poetry — 

Who  now,  with  greedy  looks,  eats  up  my  feast? 
What  stare  outfaces  now  my  silver  moon? 
Ah,  keep  that  hand  unravish'd  at  the  least ; 

Let,  let  the  amorous  burn — 

But,  pry'thee,  do  not  turn 
The  current  of  your  heart  from  me  so  soon. 

O  !  save,  in  charity, 

The  quickest  pulse  for  me. 

And  the  poem  ends  with  the  desperate  serious- 
124 


The  Promise  of  Keats 

ness   of  a  passion   that  he  knows  will  not  be 
understood — 

Ah  !  if  you  prize  my  subdued  soul  above 
The  poor,  the  fading,  brief  pride  of  an  hour  ; 
Let  none  profane  my  Holy  See  of  love, 

Or  with  a  rude  hand  break 

The  sacramental  cake  ; 
Let  none  else  touch  the  just  new-budded  flower  : 

If  not — may  my  eyes  close. 

Love  !  on  their  last  repose. 

But  still  stranger,  and  with  still  more 
promise  of  incredible  things,  are  the  Lines  to 
Fanny,  in  which  we  see  him  possessed  by  the 
fear  of  love;  almost  hating  it,  though  he 
cannot  hate  her,  because  he  knows  that  love 
will  persist  and  yet  be  subdued  to  the  discords, 
the  imperfections,  the  routine  of  life  ;  that  it 
can  continue  when  the  morning  freshness  and 
the  music  are  gone  from  it — 

Where  shall  I  learn  to  get  my  peace  again? 
To  banish  thoughts  of  that  most  hateful  land, 
Dungeoner  of  my  friends,  that  wicked  strand 
Where  they  were  wreck'd  and  live  a  wrecked  life  ; 
That  monstrous  region,  where  dull  rivers  pour, 
Ever  from  their  sordid  urns  unto  the  shore, 
Unown'd  of  any  weedy-haired  gods  ; 
Whose  winds,  all  zephyrless,  hold  scourging  rods. 
Iced  in  the  great  lakes,  to  afflict  mankind  ; 
Whose  rank-grown  forests,  frosted,  black,  and  blind, 
125 


Essays  on  Books 


Would  fright  a  Dryad  ;  whose  harsh-herbaged  meads 
Make  lean  and  lank  the  starv'd  ox  while  he  feeds  ; 
There  bad  flowers   have   no   scent,  birds  no   sweet 

song, 
And  great  unerring  Nature  once  seems  wrong. 

It  is  the  awakening  of  La  belle  dame  sans 
merci  expressed  with  a  new  psychological 
precision ;  and  it  seems  to  promise  that  Keats 
was  to  be  the  Donne  of  the  romantic  move- 
ment, but  a  greater  Donne  who  had  mastered 
that  which  he  forsook,  who  could  express  his 
disillusionment  with  all  the  music  of  his  old 
illusions. 

But  always  he  returns  from  these  rebellions 
and  misgivings  with  a  sick  passion  to  the  hope 
of  a  complete  rest  and  harmony  in  love — 

I  cry  your  mercy — pity — love  ! — aye,  love  ! 

Merciful  love  that  tantalises  not, 
One-thoughted,  never-wandering,  guileless  love, 

Unmask'd,  and  being  seen — without  a  blot ! 

This  Fanny  Brawne  could  not  give  him  ;  she 
was  not  ready  to  play  her  part  as  the  mistress 
of  a  poet.  Keats  was  to  her  just  her  young 
man  whom  she  would  play  off*  against  other 
young  men ;  yet  he  was  bound  to  her  by  the 
sick,  exasperated  desire  of  the  consumptive.  He 
longed  to  be  free,  to  feel  and  think  about  the 
universe,  and  he  could  feel  and  think  about  her 
126 


The  Promise  of  Keats 

alone.  A  little  longer  and  he  might  have 
written  of  her  as  Catullus  wrote  of  Lesbia  ;  but 
he  went  to  Italy  to  die  and,  on  the  way,  wrote 
that  last  sonnet  in  which  he  still  dreamt  of  a 
Nirvana  of  love. 

Nothing  could  be  sadder  than  this  last  re- 
turn to  an  impossible  dream,  and  the  thought 
that  he  left  her,  baffled  and  starving,  with  no 
other  dream  to  take  its  place.  But  we  are 
concerned  now  with  that  last  growth  of  his 
mind  which  was  stopped  in  its  first  promise 
by  disease.  Nothing  foreshadows  his  unguessed 
greatness  so  much  as  this  power  of  writing  a 
strange  new  poetry  about  his  first  discomfort- 
ing experience  of  passion.  He  might  have 
thrust  it  to  the  back  of  his  mind  and  refused 
to  write  poetry  about  it ;  he  might  have  remained 
a  forlorn  romantic  without  conviction.  But  he 
was  too  great  a  poet  not  to  accept  the  experi- 
ence in  all  its  ugliness  and  sharpness.  To  him 
the  miseries  of  the  world  were  at  last  misery 
and  not  something  to  make  poetry  about. 
He  saw  the  general  unhappiness  in  his  own ; 
he  saw  that  reality  alone  was  interesting,  how- 
ever disconcerting  it  might  be ;  and  that  it 
was  reality  only  to  those  who  experienced  it 
fully.  There  is  fullness  of  experience  in  those 
Lines  to  Fanny  as  in  no  earlier  poem  of  his, 
127 


Essays  on  Books 

yet  it  is  all  poetized.  He  can  make  phrases 
about  it  as  rich  as  any  he  made  about  the 
nightingale — 

And  great  unerring  nature  once  seems  wrong. 

Perhaps  that  is  the  finest  line  he  ever  wrote ; 
more  than  any  other,  at  least,  it  promises  the 
incredible  things  that  he  would  have  written. 
It  is  strange  that  Shelley,  who  cared  for  little 
of  his  poetry,  who  cannot  have  known  that 
his  mind  was  like  the  wide  world  dreaming  of 
things  to  come,  should  yet  have  given  a  con- 
vincing music  to  our  dreams  about  him — 

It  was  for  thee  yon  kingless  sphere  has  long 
Swung  blind  in  unascended  majesty, 
Silent  alone  amid  an  Heaven  of  Song. 
Assume    thy    winged    throne,    thou    Vesper   of  our 
throng. 

We  cannot  believe  that  such  a  mind  shared 
the  corruption  of  the  body,  that  such  a  music 
ended,  broken  and  dismayed  by  its  own  end- 
ing, Shelley  knew,  when  he  was  among  the 
prophets,  that — 

The  soul  of  Adonais,  like  a  star, 

Beacons  from  the  abode  where  the  Eternal  are. 


128 


The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler        ^ 

SAMUEL  BUTLER  said  that  "the  true 
writer  will  stop  everywhere  and  any- 
where to  put  down  his  notes,  as  the  true 
painter  will  stop  everywhere  and  anywhere  to 
sketch."  He  himself,  as  Mr.  Festing  Jones  tells 
us  in  his  preface  to  The  Note-Books,  began  to 
make  notes  early,  and  continued  until  he  died. 
For  the  last  eleven  years  of  his  life  he  spent  an 
hour  a  day  re-editing  them ;  and  he  left  five 
bound  volumes  of  them,  with  enough  material 
unbound  to  make  another  volume.  Mr. 
Festing  Jones  has  made  selections  from  all 
these,  grouping  the  notes  under  different  heads  ; 
and  he  has  added  an  index  which  I  have  tested 
and  found  excellent.  For  the  first  enjoyment 
of  the  book  all  that  is  needed  is  to  read  it 
through ;  but  afterwards  anyone  who  deserves 
to  possess  it  will  want  to  know  his  way  about 
it.  The  index  will  guide  him  ;  and  the  editor 
deserves  our  thanks  for  that  almost  as  much  as 
for  giving  us  the  book  itself. 
I  129 


Essays  on  Books 

Samuel  Butler  was  a  born  writer,  but  also  a 
born  amateur.  He  knew  this  himself,  and  he 
was  no  doubt  thinking  of  his  own  work  when 
he  wrote  a  note  upon  Amateurs  and  Pro- 
fessionals. 

There  is  no  excuse  [he  says]  for  amateur 
work  being  bad.  Amateurs  often  excuse  their 
shortcomings  on  the  ground  that  they  are  not 
professionals,  the  professional  could  plead  with 
greater  justice  that  he  is  not  an  amateur.  .  .  . 
He  has  got  to  square  every  one  all  round,  and 
will  assuredly  fail  to  make  his  way  unless  he 
does  this ;  if,  then,  he  betrays  his  trust  he  does 
so  under  temptation.  .  .   . 

The  question  is,  what  is  the  amateur  an 
amateur  of  ?  What  is  he  really  in  love  with  ? 
Is  he  in  love  with  other  people,  thinking  he 
sees  something  which  he  would  like  to  show 
them  ?  ...  If  this  is  his  position  he  can  do  no 
wrong,  the  spirit  in  which  he  works  will  ensure 
that  his  defects  will  be  only  as  bad  spelling  or 
bad  grammar  in  some  pretty  saying  of  a  child. 

In  fact,  the  amateur  can  afford  to  be  dis- 
interested ;  and  Butler  ordered  his  whole  life  so 
that  he  might  be  able  to  afford  this  expensive 
luxury.  Not  only  did  he  learn  to  do  with 
very  little  money ;  he  also  economized  in 
beliefs  and  emotions,  not  because  he  was  by 
nature  cold  or  sceptical,  but  because  he  would 
not  be  a  partisan  of  any  one  view  of  life.  He 
130 


The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 

seems  to  have  regarded  himself  as  a  consecrated 
bachelor;  Melchisedec,  he  says,  was  a  really 
happy  man.  "  He  was  without  father,  without 
mother,  and  without  descent.  He  was  an 
incarnate  bachelor.  He  was  a  born  orphan." 
He  wished  to  be  a  Melchisedec  free  from  all 
ties  whatever,  spiritual  and  intellectual  as  well 
as  material.  He  only  wrote  a  book,  he  said, 
when  it  came  to  him  and  insisted  upon  being 
written,  and  it  was  the  same  with  convictions. 
He  did  not  seek  after  them,  they  had  to  force 
themselves  upon  him.  Such  a  man  would  be 
an  uninteresting  failure  if  he  had  no  convictions ; 
Butler  is  interesting  because  his  convictions, 
though  few,  were  strong. 

He  had,  as  he  takes  pains  to  show  us,  no 
grievance  against  life  or  the  human  race.  If 
a  sentimentalist  had  complained  that  nothing 
was  sacred  to  him  he  might  have  answered  that 
everything  was  sacred.  That  was  the  reason 
why  he  was  ready  to  joke  about  everything 
he  made  no  division  between  sheep  and  goats, 
between  the  serious  and  the  trivial,  between  the 
sublime  and  the  ridiculous.  He  was  at  ease 
about  the  universe  as  much  as  a  mediaeval 
Christian  about  his  religion,  and  had  the  same 
delight  in  profanity.  The  Note-books  are  full 
of  his  naughtiness ;  and  no  one  could  be 
131 


Essays  on  Books 

shocked  by  it  who  did  not  enjoy  being  shocked. 
"  It  is  all  very  well  for  mischievous  writers 
to  maintain  that  we  cannot  serve  God  and 
Mammon.  Granted  that  it  is  not  easy,  but 
nothing  that  is  worth  doing  ever  is  easy.'"" 
That  remark  is  worth  considering,  because 
Butler  had  no  personal  interest  in  making  it. 
He  was  not  trying  to  excuse  himself  for 
serving  Mammon  alone ;  he  had  an  indifference 
to  Mammon  so  complete  that  he  could  say  a 
good  word  for  him.  So  Keats  told  Shelley  that 
an  artist  must  serve  Mammon.  "  He  must 
have  self-concentration — selfishness  perhaps." 
Both  mean  that  there  is  always  a  practical 
problem  to  be  solved ;  and  Butler  would  have 
said  that,  as  God  sets  the  problem,  you  cannot 
serve  Him  without  serving  Mammon. 

Butler's  naughtiness  is  an  indulgence  that  he 
permits  himself,  knowing  that  it  will  not 
become  a  vice  of  his  mind.  It  was  as  delicious 
to  him  as  idleness  to  a  busy  man — and  as 
necessary.  For  his  weakness  was  to  become  too 
serious  about  everything  that  he  undertook ; 
he  enjoyed  the  game  of  proving  just  as  much  as 
the  game  of  disproving,  and  he  convinced  him- 
self that  Nausicaa  wrote  the  Odyssey.  Indeed, 
but  for  his  recreations  of  naughtiness,  he  might 
have  become  a  bigot  or  at  least  a  crank.  It 
132 


The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 

was  his  instinct  of  self-preservation  that  drove 
him  to  them ;  and  in  them  he  reacted  against 
himself  as  much  as  •  against  anyone  else. 
Swift,  incessant  reaction  is  the  secret  of 
Butler's  wit ;  it  was  what  gave  life  to  his 
thought  and  adventures  to  his  mind.  With 
some  comic  writers  it  is  a  vulgar  trick  played 
coldly  and  mechanically.  With  Butler  it  is  a 
habit,  but  a  habit  that  surprises  even  him  ;  and 
we  feel  the  surprise  in  his  unexpected  turns  of 
speech.  It  is  a  reaction,  too,  just  as  often  from 
the  absurd  to  the  serious  as  from  the  serious  to 
the  absurd.  Take,  for  instance,  this  passage 
headed  "Night-shirts  and  Babies,"  which 
a^ffords  a  good  example  of  the  adventures  of 
his  mind  : — 

On  Hindhead,  last  Easter,  we  saw  a  family 
wash  hung  out  to  dry.  There  were  papa's 
two  great  night-shirts  and  mamma's  two  lesser 
nightgowns,  and  then  the  children's  smaller 
articles  of  clothing  and  mamma's  drawers  and 
the  girls'  drawers,  all  full  swollen  with  a  strong 
north-east  wind.  But  mamma's  nightgown 
was  not  so  well  pinned  on,  and,  instead  of  being 
full  of  steady  wind,  like  the  others,  kept  blow- 
ing up  and  down  as  though  she  were  preaching 
wildly.  ...  I  should  like  a  Santa  Famiglia 
with  clothes  drying  in  the  background. 

That   desu-e  for   a  Holy  Family  with  clothes 
133 


Essays  on  Books 

drying  in  the  background  expresses  the  whole 
character  of  Butler's  mind.  It  was  not  that  he 
wanted  to  sneer  at  the-  Holy  Family,  but  that 
he  liked  the  beautiful  and  the  comic  in  the 
same  picture.  His  mind  got  zest  for  each  from 
the  contrast  between  them ;  he  was  like  the 
builders  of  the  Middle  Ages,  who  adorned  their 
cathedrals  with  gargoyles,  and  he  liked  to  play 
the  part  of  a  gargoyle  himself,  grinning  among 
all  the  solemnities  of  the  universe  yet  not 
incongruous  with  them.  It  is  the  glory  of 
Gothic  art  that  it  has  room  for  the  grotesque 
as  well  as  the  beautiful ;  and  for  Butler  life 
itself  had  the  same  glory.  He  made  his  jests 
about  everything  in  heaven  and  earth,  not 
because  he  thought  nothing  serious,  but 
because  he  tested  the  seriousness  of  everything 
by  its  power  to  survive  the  ordeal.  No  one 
ever  had  more  of  the  humorist's  delight  in 
the  universal  imperfection  of  things.  "  All 
progress,"  he  said,  "  is  based  upon  a  universal, 
innate  desire  on  the  part  of  every  organism  to 
live  beyond  its  income."  He  laughed,  as  M. 
Bergson  says  we  always  laugh,  at  the  victory  of 
the  mechanical  over  life ;  but  this  very  laughter 
implied,  as  all  genuine  laughter  must,  the  belief 
that  life  is  not  mechanical.  "  Life,"  he  says, 
"  is  eight  parts  cards  and  two  parts  play,  the 
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The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 

unseen  world  is  made  manifest  to  us  in  the 
play."  There  was  nothing  he  hated  so  much 
as  heresies  of  perfection  in  morals,  science,  or 
art ;  he  hated  any  explanation  of  anything  that 
professed  to  be  complete,  any  ambition  of 
absolute  virtue,  any  attempt  to  produce  perfect 
beauty ;  and  that  not  because  he  disbelieved  in 
truth,  virtue,  and  beauty,  for  he  loved  them  all 
three,  but  because  he  thought  they  could  only 
manifest  themselves  in  imperfection.  Of  the 
philosopher  he  says : — 

He  should  have  made  many  mistakes  and 
been  saved  often  by  the  skin  of  his  teeth,  for 
the  skin  of  one"'s  teeth  is  the  most  teaching 
thing  about  one.  He  should  have  been,  or  at 
any  rate  believed  himself,  a  great  fool  and  a 
great  criminal.  He  should  have  cut  himself 
adrift  from  society,  and  yet  not  be  without 
society.  He  should  have  given  up  all,  even 
Christ  himself,  for  Christ's  sake.  He  should 
be  above  fear  or  love  or  hate,  and  yet  know 
them  extremely  well. 

The  same  might  be  said  of  the  saint ;  indeed, 
a  wise  man  once  said  of  some  one  that  he  was 
bom  too  good  ever  to  be  a  saint.  According 
to  Butler,  it  is  only  through  our  faults  that 
we  get  experience  and  the  wisdom  and  virtue 
that  come  of  it ;  yet  we  must  know  that  they 


Essays  on  Books 

are  faults  before  we  can  profit  by  them. 
Nothing  is  so  incapacitating  as  self-love ;  and 
most  of  his  ridicule  was  really  directed  against 
that  and  against  the  idols  begotten  of  it.  "  I 
am  the  eivfant  terrible  of  literature  and  science," 
he  says.  "  If  I  cannot,  and  I  know  I  cannot, 
get  the  literary  and  scientific  big-wigs  to  give 
me  a  shilling,  I  can,  and  I  know  I  can,  heave 
bricks  into  the  middle  of  them."  He  enjoyed 
heaving  bricks  disinterestedly ;  but  he  took 
good  aim  with  them.  It  was  one  of  his  foibles 
not  to  be  impressed  by  reputations,  however 
great  or  old  ;  for  reputations  are  only  dogmas, 
and  he  was  against  all  dogmas.  So  far  as  he 
was  concerned  the  most  famous  poet,  painter, 
or  musician  had  to  win  his  reputation,  not  to 
impose  it ;  and  the  Greek  tragedians,  Michel- 
angelo, Bach,  and  Beethoven  could  win  no 
praise  from  him. 

In  all  his  judgments  he  was  a  typical  insular 
eccentric;  indeed,  he  was  the  latest,  and 
perhaps  the  last,  of  that  great  race  of  eccentric 
amateurs  who  are  the  glory  and  scandal  of 
England.  A  Frenchman  or  German  of  culture 
would  think  him  a  mere  barbarian  to-day; 
fifty  years  hence,  perhaps,  some  German  will 
write  a  huge  book  about  him,  proving  that  he 
was  the  father  of  modern  thought,  the  great 
136 


The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 

rebel  against  romantic  illusions,  compared  with 
whom  Nietzsche  was  a  rhetorician.  Butler 
often  talks  like  Nietzsche,  as  where  he  disputes 
Matthew  Arnold's  notion  that  "  righteousness 
was  to  the  Jew  what  strength  and  beauty  were 
to  the  Greek  or  fortitude  to  the  Roman." 

This  sounds  well  [he  says]  but  can  we  think 
that  the  Jews,  taken  as  a  nation,  were  really 
more  righteous  than  the  Greeks  and  Romans  ? 
Could  they  indeed  be  so  if  they  were  less 
strong,  graceful,  and  enduring  ? 

And  yet  we  are  sure  that  he  would  not  have 
liked  Nietzsche,  for  Nietzsche  was  too  much 
of  a  professional  rebel  and  brow-beater  for 
his  taste.  Nietzsche  wrote  as  if  he  were  a 
politician  addressing  a  meeting  of  his  own 
supporters ;  he  flattered  the  self-love  of  other 
rebels,  and  encouraged  them  to  think  of  them- 
selves as  a  sect  in  possession  of  the  truth. 
But  Butler  had  no  desire  to  form  a  sect  or  to 
address  an  audience  of  rebels. 

But  you,  nice  People  !  [he  cries] 

Who  will  be  sick  of  me    because   the  critics   thrust 

me  down  your  throats, 
But   who   would    take   me    willingly   enough    if  you 

were  not  bored  about  me,  .  .  . 
Please  remember  that,  if  I  were  living,  I  should  be 

upon  your  side 


Essays  on  Books 

And  should  hate  those   who   imposed  me  either  on 

myself  or  others  ; 
Therefore,  I   pray   you,   neglect   me,   burlesque   me, 

boil  me  down,  do  whatever  you  like  with  me, 
But   do   not   think   that,  if  I    were   living,   I    should 

not  aid  and  abet  you. 
There    is    nothing    that    even     Shakespeare    would 

enjoy  more  than  a  good  burlesque  of  Hamlet. 

And  nothing,  we  may  add,  that  Butler  enjoyed 
more  than  a  good  burlesque  of  human  life, 
which  would  amuse  the  nice  people  and  shock 
the  professionals.  The  nice  people  were  his 
chosen  audience,  the  people  who  have  their 
own  likes  and  dislikes  and  are  not  committed 
to  any  kind  of  theory ;  the  people  who  do  not 
want  to  impose  themselves  on  others,  and  who 
do  not  pretend  to  know  or  feel  more  than 
they  do  know  and  feel.  But  that  unassuming 
word  "nice"  meant  much  when  he  used  it; 
and,  having  said  that  a  man  was  nice,  he  was 
likely  the  next  moment  to  say  that  he  was  saved. 
This  meant,  finally,  that  he  was  disinterested, 
not  merely  according  to  rule  and  in  the  ordinary 
conduct  of  life,  but  in  his  very  nature,  seeking 
no  reward  for  his  virtue  even  from  his  own 
conscience,  and  being,  indeed,  unconscious  of 
it.  Now  and  again  in  these  notes  Butler  be- 
trays his  own  passion  for  disinterestedness. 

The  world  admits  [he  says]  that   there   is 
138 


The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 

another  world,  that  there  is  a  kingdom, 
veritable  and  worth  having,  which,  neverthe- 
less, is  invisible  and  has  nothing  to  do  with 
any  kingdom  such  as  we  now  see.  It  agrees 
that  the  wisdom  of  this  other  kingdom  is 
foolishness  here  on  earth,  while  the  wisdom 
of  the  world  is  foolishness  in  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven.  In  our  hearts  we  know  that  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  the  higher  of  the  two 
and  the  better  worth  living  and  dying  for, 
and  that,  if  it  is  to  be  won,  it  must  be  sought 
steadfastly  and  in  singleness  of  heart  by  those 
who  put  all  else  on  one  side  and,  shrinking 
from  no  sacrifice,  are  ready  to  face  shame, 
poverty,  and  torture  here  rather  than  abandon 
the  hope  of  the  prize  of  their  high  calling. 
Nobody  who  doubts  any  of  this  is  worth 
talking  with. 

And  in  answer  to  the  question,  How  are  we 
to  find  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  ?  he  says : 
"  We  are  not  likely  to  go  wrong  if  in  all 
simplicity,  humility,  and  good  faith  we  heartily 
desire  to  find  it  and  follow  the  dictates  of 
ordinary  common  sense." 

Butler  believed  and  insisted  that  common 
sense  was  necessary  to  salvation,  was,  indeed, 
a  symptom  of  it.  That  was  where  he  differed 
from  Romantics  and  from  the  worldly  alike. 
Romantics  think  common  sense  is  no  concern 
of  theirs,  and  the  worldly  think  it  is  only 
139 


Essays  on  Books 

their  concern.  Butler  set  it  above  the  scorn 
of  the  one  class  and  the  patronage  of  the 
other.  It  was  a  gift,  he  held,  to  be  cultivated 
for  all  purposes,  and  as  necessary  to  the  saint 
and  the  artist  as  to  the  man  of  business ;  the 
fact  that  they  pursue  different  ends  makes  no 
difference.  Life  is  a  matter  of  execution  as 
well  as  of  conception ;  and  if  the  execution 
is  poor  it  will  pervert  the  conception.  His 
sharpest  satire  was  directed  against  the  people 
who  pervert  their  conception  with  bad  exe- 
cution— the  sentimentalists,  doctrinaires,  Phari- 
sees ;  all  the  people  who  love  themselves  and 
their  own  theories  better  than  anything  else, 
and  who  therefore  never  test  their  theories 
by  results.  In  all  this  Butler,  however  much 
he  may  like  to  shock  us  in  detail,  follows  the 
great  orthodox  tradition  of  the  ages.  He  is  with 
Socrates  against  the  Sophists  and  with  Christ 
against  the  Pharisees.  "  Forget  yourself  and 
love  others,"  he  says,  "  and  you  shall  attain  to 
common  sense  and  be  one  of  the  nice  people — 
in  fact,  you  shall  be  saved."  He  puts  it  all 
prosaically  because  in  our  time  the  worldly 
have  captured  prose  as  the  Romantics  have 
captured  poetry ;  and  it  was  his  aim  to  deliver 
prose,  like  common  sense,  from  the  clutches  of 
the  worldly.  If  he  had  been  a  poet  he  would 
140 


The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 

no  doubt  have  tried  to  deliver  poetry  from  the 
clutches  of  the  Romantics.  As  it  was  he  wrote 
one  piece,  the  In  Memoriam  to  H.R.F., 
which  is  poetry  in  its  matter  and  half-poetry 
in  its  form ;  and  no  one  knows  Butler  who 
has  not  read  this.  But  no  one  knows  him  who 
has  not  read  this  book  through ;  and  perhaps 
it  will  come  to  be  the  most  read  and  valued 
of  all  his  books. 


141 


The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler  ««2>       -«> 

SAMUEL  BUTLER  often  spoke  against 
the  sin  of  biographers,  which  is  greater 
than  they  know.  By  refusing  to  tell  the 
whole  truth,  or  the  most  interesting  part  of  it, 
not  only  do  they  make  their  biographies  dull, 
but  they  mislead  and  discourage  mankind. 
The  great  man,  as  they  present  him,  has 
attained  to  a  perfection  both  impossible  and 
insipid ;  we  despair  of  being  like  him  and  do 
not  wish  to  be  like  him ;  we  may  think  him  a 
Parsifal,  but  we  resent  him  as  a  pure  fool. 
Butler  himself  said  of  his  Life  of  his  grand- 
father, Dr.  Butler : — 

It  is  better  that  I  should  be  indiscreet  and 
dishonourable  than  that  men's  true  minds 
should  be  concealed  and  turned  again  to  false- 
hood, if  we  have  a  chance  of  getting  at  them. 
It  is  next  to  never  that  we  can  get  at  any 
man's  genuine  opinion  on  any  subject,  except 
the  weather  or  eating  and  drinking ;  and  when 
we  can  do  so  directly  or  indirectly  neither 
142 


The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 

amour  propre  nor  discretion  should  be  allowed 
to  veil  it,  for  there  is  nothing  in  this  world  so 
precious  nor  is  there  any  other  stuff  from  which 
genuine  fresh  opinion  can  derive. 

Mr.  Festing  Jones,  who,  like  Butler  himself, 
has  a  gift  for  humanizing  the  wisdom  of  the 
serpent,  is  careful  to  quote  this  in  the  preface  to 
his  Life  of  Butler ;  it  is  his  answer  to  those  who 
may  accuse  him  of  indiscretion.  He  has  written 
as  if  for  Butler  to  read ;  and  we  are  sure  that, 
whatever  anyone  else  thinks  about  the  book, 
Butler  would  have  liked  it.  His  method  is  the 
method  of  Boswell ;  he  seems  to  tell  all  he 
knows,  but  his  interest  in  his  subject  has  made 
him  select  by  instinct  what  is  interesting 
because  it  describes  Butler.  The  book  in 
form  is  a  chronicle,  all  nari'ative  and  little 
description  ;  but  the  narrative  describes,  and, 
with  each  chapter,  we  know  more  of  Butler,  as 
a  man  living  and  changing  and  growing  before 
us ;  we  cannot  know  him  completely  until  we 
have  read  to  the  end,  because  he  himself  was 
completed  only  by  death.  In  fact,  it  is  one 
of  the  best  biographies  in  the  language,  a 
document  of  human  nature,  because  it  shows 
us  a  particular  man  in  all  his  circumstances  of 
time  and  place,  and  a  document  which,  as  we 
read  it,  we  know  we  can  trust. 
143 


Essays   on  Books 

Butler  liked  to  present  himself  in  his  books  as 
a  smiling  invulnerable  critic  of  the  universe ; 
but  here  we  learn  how  often  he  was  wounded. 
He  might,  if  he  had  chosen,  have  made  a 
tragedy  of  The  Way  of  All  Flesh ;  but  he 
would  not  exhibit  the  pageant  of  his  bleeding 
heart,  because  he  wished  it  to  bleed  as  little 
as  possible.  As  we  read,  we  discover  that  life 
was  not  kind  to  him,  and  that  he  was  always 
trying  to  armour  himself  against  fate.  To 
begin  with,  his  childhood  was  unhappy ;  in  a 
letter  written  when  he  was  forty,  he  says,  "  I 
have  had  the  worst  three  years  I  ever  had 
since  the  horrors  of  childhood  and  boy- 
hood " ;  and  he  did  not  often  complain  of  any- 
thing. Then  for  many  years  he  mistook  his 
vocation,  trying  to  paint  when  he  was  born  to 
write ;  he  lost  a  great  part  of  his  money 
through  trusting  in  friends ;  he  found  after 
many  years  that  he  had  wasted  affection  on  his 
dearest  male  friend ;  and,  what  was  almost 
worse,  his  dearest  female  friend  seemed  to  be 
wasting  her  affection  on  him,  at  least  he 
believed  that  she  wished  to  be  his  v/ife,  while 
he  did  not  wish  to  be  her  husband.  So  there 
was  a  misfit  both  ways ;  and  he  remained  a 
bachelor,  hungry  for  a  happiness  which  he 
knew  to  exist. 

144 


The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 

That  is  one  side  of  him,  concealed  in  his 
pubHc  writings,  but  now  revealed  without  undue 
emphasis  in  Mr.  Jones's  narrative.  One  might 
have  guessed  it  from  Erexvhon  Revisited,  which 
is  made  beautiful  and  moving  by  the  hero's 
hunger  for  affection,  Butler's  own  hunger,  for 
he  always  wrote  autobiography  in  his  stories, 
and  cared  for  nothing  in  other  stories  that  was 
not  autobiography.  He  was  a  disappointed 
man,  and  his  disappointments  made  him  sus- 
picious ;  hence  his  grievance  against  Darwin. 
As  Mr.  Jones  says,  with  an  affection  too  great 
not  to  be  candid,  "  Butler  felt  he  had  been 
taken  in.  It  was  John  Picard  Owen  and  the 
chickens  over  again  ;  it  was  the  alleged  death 
and  resurrection  of  Jesus  Christ  over  again  ;  it 
was  his  own  education  over  again ;  and  there 
was  nothing  for  it  but  to  investigate  the  whole 
subject  and  write  a  book  about  it.  This  book 
was  Evolution,  Old  and  New.''''  Butler,  with  his 
attacks  now  on  religion,  now  on  science,  is  to 
be  understood  only  when  we  see  him  in  process 
of  finding  out  the  world.  There  was  a  con- 
spiracy to  keep  him,  young,  unsuspecting,  and 
generous,  in  the  dark,  to  exploit  his  best 
qualities  and  the  best  qualities  of  all  the 
young.  His  father  tried  to  make  a  parson  of 
him  by  concealing  the  facts  about  the  Gospels, 
K  145 


Essays  on  Books 

and  his  father  was  only  a  party  to  one  great 
conspiracy.  Darwin  tried  to  make  him  believe 
that  there  was  no  intelligence  in  the  order  of 
the  universe  by  concealing  the  facts  about 
the  universe ;  and  he  was  only  a  party  to 
another  great  conspiracy.  So  finally  he  re- 
venged himself  on  his  father  in  The  Way  of  all 
Flesh  and  The  Fair  Haven ;  and  on  Darwin  in 
a  series  of  books ;  but  he  was  always  trying  to 
purge  himself  of  the  bitterness  which  these 
deceptions  provoked  in  him :  he  would  not  be 
a  weakling  squealing  against  his  oppressors ;  if 
he  was  deceived  it  was  his  own  fault.  It 
is  more  immoral,  he  insisted,  to  be  prey 
than  a  beast  of  prey  ;  he  would  be  neither, 
but  a  man  who  explained  to  the  beast  of  prey 
the  very  processes  by  which,  unconsciously,  he 
hypnotized  his  victims.  He  disliked  his  father 
not  so  much  for  being  a  serpent  as  for  persuad- 
ing himself  that  he  was  a  dove ;  he  saw  the 
world  infested  with  serpents  disguised,  even  to 
themselves,  as  doves,,  and  so  lacking  the  beauty 
of  the  serpent ;  and  his  mission,  or  his  pleasure, 
was  to  undisguise  these  prudish  serpents,  to  the 
world  and  to  themselves. 

Butler  tried  to  be  fair  to  his  father.     In 
1883  he  wrote  this  note  on  their  relations : — 

He  never   liked   me,  nor  I  him ;  from   my 
146 


The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 

earliest  recollections  I  can  call  to  mind  no 
time  when  I  did  not  fear  him  and  dislike  him  ; 
over  and  over  again  I  have  relented  towards 
him  and  said  to  myself  that  he  was  a  good 
fellow  after  all;  but  I  had  hardly  done  so 
when  he  would  go  for  me  in  some  way  or  other 
which  soured  me  again.  I  have  no  doubt  I  have 
made  myself  very  disagreeable  ;  certainly  I  have 
done  many  very  silly  and  wrong  things ;  I  am 
not  at  all  sure  that  the  fault  is  more  his  than 
mine.  But  no  matter  whose  it  is,  the  fact 
remains  that  for  years  and  years  I  have  never 
passed  a  day  without  thinking  of  him  many 
times  over  as  the  man  who  was  sure  to  be 
against  me,  and  who  would  see  the  bad  side 
rather  than  the  good  of  everything  I  said  and 
did. 

It  would  be  futile  now  to  judge  either  of  them  ; 
but  the  story  of  their  enmity  has  value  because 
it  shows  us  how  grudges  often  grow  up  between 
father  and  son,  and  how  they  may  be  prevented. 
In  this  case  the  father  never  understood  the 
workings  of  his  own  mind  ;  he  had  been  trained 
to  conceal  them  from  himself,  never  to  admit 
to  himself  that  he  did  anything  because  he 
wished  to  do  it.  The  son  saw  his  motives 
with  fatal  clearness  and  despised  him  for 
refusing  to  see  them ;  the  father  was  afraid  of 
him  without  knowing  that  he  was  afraid,  or 
why ;  and  his  fear,  driven  like  all  his  real  feel- 
147 


Essays  on  Books 

ings  into  his  unconscious  mind,  disguised  itself 
as  dislike  and  disapproval.  Butler,  who  could 
not  speak  frankly  to  his  father  on  any  subject, 
because  of  the  convention  established  in  the 
family  that  the  father  could  do  no  wrong, 
spoke  frankly  of  his  father  in  his  own  mind 
and  in  The  Way  of  all  Flesh,  but  did  not  so 
purge  himself  of  bitterness.  He  still  kept  his 
opinion,  and  his  art,  a  secret  from  his  father, 
and  there  remained,  on  the  one  side  this  secret, 
on  the  other  unconscious  fear  because  of  it ;  on 
the  one  side  satire,  on  the  other  moral  dis- 
approval, as  weapons  in  a  warfare  always 
suppressed  and  so  never  ended.  The  moral, 
for  parents,  is  that,  if  they  do  not  know  them- 
selves, their  children  will  know  them. 

But  Butler's  worst  enemy  was  his  closest 
friend.  The  story  of  Charles  Paine  Pauli  is 
stranger  than  fiction,  and  would  be  incredible 
if  it  had  not  happened.  Butler  got  to  know 
him  in  New  Zealand,  and  admired  him  as  being 
all  that  he  himself  was  not :  handsome,  attrac- 
tive, a  man  of  the  world  who  knew  where  to 
get  well-fitting  clothes  and  how  to  wear  them. 
But  Pauli  had  no  money  and  was  in  bad  health  ; 
Butler  believed  that,  if  he  stayed  in  New  Zealand, 
he  would  die.  So  they  both  returned  to  England, 
Butler  lending  him  ^£'100  for  the  voyage  and 
148 


The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 

promising  to  pay  him  =£^200  a  year  for  three 
years  so  that  he  might  be  called  to  the  Bar. 
This  was  in  1864,  and  Butler  continued  to 
support  Pauli,  as  he  supposed,  until  Pauli's 
death  in  1897.  Pauli  never  would  tell  him 
anything  about  his  affairs ;  and  for  some  time 
Butler  lived  in  penury,  sharing  what  he  had 
with  Pauli,  Their  friendship  was  not  happy  ; 
Butler  thought  that  Pauli  was  possessed  by  a 
dumb  devil.  "  The  wrongness  of  his  silence 
wounded  me.  I  told  him  that  I  thought  it 
wrong,  but  he  said  he  would  tell  me  if  he 
could — it  was  so  difficult  to  say  exactly  what 
he  was  earning — people  did  not  pay  him,  etc., 
and  I,  still  believing  him  to  be  much  as  I  was 
myself  in  the  matter  of  good  faith,  accepted 
his  excuses."  Even  when  Butler  lost  nearly  all 
his  money,  Pauli  would  not  tell  him  anything 
of  his  private  affairs,  nor  where  he  lived,  nor 
whether  he  was  making  anything  at  the  Bar ; 
and  they  never  met  except  when  Pauli  came 
over  from  Lincoln's  Inn  to  lunch  at  Butler's 
early  dinner  in  Clifford's  Inn.  But  still  Butler 
tried  to  believe  the  best  of  Pauli ;  said  he  was 
kind  to  animals,  and  behaved  with  all  the 
infatuation  of  a  bachelor  who,  unconsciously, 
tries  to  make  a  friend  the  substitute  for  a  wife. 
In  1897  Pauli  died  without  sending  for  Butler, 
149 


Essays  on  Books 

who  saw  his  death  in  The  Times.  He  then 
discovered  that  Pauli  had  at  one  time  earned 
from  d£'800  to  <£'900  a  year  at  the  Bar,  but 
lately  only  about  ^500.  He  left  ^^9000,  none 
of  it  to  Butler;  and  he  had  been  receiving 
money  from  other  friends.  Butler  wrote  a 
full  account  of  his  relations  with  Pauli,  and 
said  at  the  end  of  it :  "  My  main  feeling  is 
one  of  thankfulness  that  I  never  suspected  the 
facts,  .  .  .  The  only  decent  end  for  such  a  white 
heat  of  devotion  as  mine  was  to  him  for  so  many 
years  was  the  death  of  one  or  other  of  the 
parties  concerned.  ...  I  felt  pretty  sure  I 
was  doing  a  great  deal  too  much,  but  I  would 
rather  have  done  a  great  deal  too  much  than  a 
little  too  little."  In  1901  he  wrote  this  note : 
"  I  knew  I  was  being  cruelly  treated,  but 
how  cruelly  I  never  knew  till  after  his  death, 
when  I  could  not  even  forgive  him,  as  I  would 
have  done." 

The  great  satirists  are  always  men  who, 
one  way  or  another,  have  been  cruelly  injured  ; 
their  love  is  negative  in  their  art  because  it 
has  been  baulked ;  but  we  can  see  how  much 
Butler  was  injured  in  the  affair  of  Pauli  from 
the  fact  that  he,  who  made  so  much  of  his  art 
out  of  autobiography,  could  never  use  this 
story  for  satire ;  he  could  only  write  a  plain 
150 


The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 

account  of  it.  We  can  see  also  that  he  tried 
to  make  himself  out  a  kind  of  Sancho  Panza 
to  all  the  false  quixotries  of  the  world  because 
he  was  really  a  Don  Quixote.  It  was  a  case 
of  protective  mimicry,  in  which  the  fly 
managed  to  persuade  himself,  and  the  wasps, 
that  he  had  a  sharper  sting  than  theirs. 

It  is  interesting  to  know  that  he  drew 
Towneley  in  The  Way  of  all  Flesh  from 
Pauli.  It  was  not  a  good  likeness,  for  it 
expressed  only  his  illusions  about  Pauli  and 
also  about  the  Towneleys  of  the  world,  whom 
he  admired  just  because  he  did  not  understand 
them.  The  man  who  quite  simply  and 
brutally  exploits  others,  who  takes  without 
giving  always,  was  different  in  kind  from 
Butler  ;  and  Butler,  who  suffered  from  his  own 
passion  for  giving,  admired  him  as  an  artist 
admires  a  Bengal  tiger,  admired  him  as  a 
perfect  and  finished  product,  while  he  himself 
had  the  malease,  the  unpreparedness,  the 
inadequacy,  of  incessant  growth.  This  in  his 
satire  he  tried  to  conceal ;  there  he  consoled 
himself  by  pretending  to  be  a  pure  ironic 
mind ;  but,  far  more  truly  than  Byron,  he 
smiled  so  that  he  might  not  weep,  or  so  that 
his  tears  might  not  be  seen. 

His  quarrel  with  Darwin  was  irrational 
151 


Essays  on  Books 

enough — so  irrational  that  we  must  look  for 
the  cause  of  it  behind  the  actual  facts ;  and 
the  cause  was  his  own  odium  theologicum.  He 
was  angry  with  Darwin  and  all  his  followers 
because  he  thought  they  denied  intelligence 
to  the  universe,  and  still  more  because  they 
denied  love  to  it.  They  emptied  all  things 
of  value ;  and  he  cared  ultimately  for  nothing 
but  the  values  of  man.  He  cared  for  them  so 
much  that  he  would  not  have  them  too  easily 
justified — to  sentimentalize  the  universe  was 
almost  worse  than  to  make  it  out  full  of  sound 
and  fury  signifying  nothing.  As  he  himself 
said,  he  was  always  ready  to  give  up  Christ 
for  Christ's  sake ;  but  the  most  real  things  in 
the  universe  to  him  were  the  Christian  virtues, 
and  he  was  not  content  to  leave  them  hanging 
in  a  meaningless  void.  "  There  is  a  something 
as  yet  but  darkly  known  which  makes  right 
right  and  wrong  wrong."  He  was  angry  with 
the  men  of  science  because,  as  it  seemed  to 
him,  they  were  trying  to  prove,  even  when 
they  were  not  sharp  enough  to  see  it  them- 
selves, that  there  is  nothing  which  makes  right 
right  and  wrong  wrong.  Hence  his  attitude 
to  the  Church,  which  will  surprise  many 
readers  of  this  book.  In  1880  he  wrote  to 
the  Bishop  of  Carlisle  : — 
152 


The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 

If  those  who  start  with  an  all-pervading, 
supreme  intelligence  can  yet  find  nothing  out 
of  harmony  with  their  initial  assumption  in  a 
theory  of  evolution,  which  is  attended  at  each 
step  by  mind,  purpose,  and  the  exercise  of  the 
moral  qualities  ;  and  if,  again,  those  who,  like 
myself,  start  with  tahukc  rasw,  and,  working 
up  from  the  first  thing  they  can  lay  hold  of, 
find  themselves  driven  first  to  evolution,  then 
to  purposive  evolution,  and  through  this  to 
the  action  of  a  supreme,  all-pervading  mind  or 
purpose  in  both  organic  and  inorganic  matter ; 
then  surely  we  may  be  upon  the  eve  of  the 
removal  of  other  misunderstandings. 

Two  years  later  he  wrote :  "  It  is  not  the 
Bishops  and  Archbishops  I  am  afraid  of. 
Men  like  Huxley  and  Tyndall  are  my  natural 
enemies,  and  I  am  always  glad  when  I  find 
church  people  recognizing  that  the  differences 
between  them  and  me  are,  as  I  believe  myself, 
more  of  words  than  things."  You  may  almost 
say  that  he  chastened  the  Church  because  he 
loved  it;  but  he  did  not  love  the  men  of 
science.  You  could  be  on  your  guard  against 
the  Church,  and  its  exasperating  habit  of 
telling  little  lies  in  the  cause  of  a  great  truth  ; 
but  the  men  of  science,  he  thought,  told  little 
truths  in  the  cause  of  a  great  lie;  and  the 
world  was  not  on  its  guard  against  them. 
153 


Essays  on  Books 

They  had    deceived   even  him ;   and   a  burnt 
child,  if  it  is  Butler,  hates  the  fire. 

I  insist  upon  this  side  of  Butler's  experience 
and  character  because  it  will  be  new  to  most 
readers ;  but  Mr.  Jones  does  not  insist  upon 
it;  he  lets  it  appear  in  the  course  of  his 
narrative.  Butler  suffered  much  in  life,  but 
he  was  not  unhappy  ;  he  wrestled  with  life, 
conquered  it,  and  enjoyed  the  sense  of  his  own 
victory.  In  1898  he  wrote  :  "  If  in  my  books 
from  Erewhon  (1872)  to  Luck  or  Cunning? 
(1887)  there  is  a  something  behind  the  written 
words  which  the  reader  can  feel  but  not  grasp 
— and  I  fancy  that  this  must  be  so — it  is  due, 
I  believe,  to  the  sense  of  wrong  which  was 
omnipresent  with  me,  not  only  in  regard  to 
Pauli,  the  Darwins,  and  my  father,  but  also 
in  regard  to  my  ever-present  anxiety  about 
money."  If  that  were  the  whole  truth,  if 
Butler  had  been  cradled  into  prose  by  wrong 
and  nothing  else,  his  books  would  be  dispirit- 
ing, which  they  are  not.  There  is  something 
else  behind  the  written  words  which  the  reader 
can  feel ;  and  that  is  the  sense  of  victory,  even 
before  it  was  won.  Butler  always  believed  in 
victory,  to  be  won  not  so  much  by  an  heroic 
defiance  of  men  and  things,  as  by  smiling  both 
at  and  with  them.  If  there  was  a  practical 
154 


The  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 

joke  in  the  universe,  he  would  rob  it  of  its 
sting  by  seeing  the  point  of  it;  and  he  did 
not  believe  that  the  joke  was  really  a  cruel 
one.  There  was  nothing  he  believed  in  so 
much  as  kindness ;  and  he  thought  one  could 
win  it,  even  from  the  nature  of  things,  by 
refusing  to  be  frightened  into  unkindness. 
So,  by  taste  and  on  principle,  he  was  the 
kindest  of  men  and  won  happiness  that  way. 
There  was  nothing  he  enjoyed  more  than 
his  relations  with  his  servant  Alfred ;  they 
were  to  him  a  symbol  of  his  success  in  life  ; 
and  we  can  see  what  they  were  from  a  letter 
which  Alfred  wrote  him  in  1891 : — 

Dear  Sir, — I  hope  you  arrived  quite  safe 
on  Tuesday  and  found  your  sister  well.  ...  I 
have  a  little  complaint  to  make.  You  never 
looked  out  of  the  carriage  to  see  me  standing 
on  the  platform  as  I  always  do.  There  was  I 
standing  in  the  rain  and  you  never  looked  at 
me.  .  .  . — Yours  truly,  Alfred. 

On  receiving  this,  Butler  sent  an  apology  by 
telegram,  and  Alfred  replied  : — 

Received  telegram  this  morning,  thank  you. 
I  showed  it  to  Mr.  Jones  and  he  laughed.  I 
forgive  you. — Alfred. 

If  bitterness  had  overcome  Butler,  he  would 

have  known  that  life  had  beaten  him  ;    as  it 

155 


Essays  on  Books 

was — out  of  the  strong  came  forth  sweetness, 
though  with  a  quick,  pecuHar  flavour  of  its 
own.  There  are  many  likenesses  of  him,  in- 
cluding portraits  by  himself;  but  the  one 
which  is  most  like  the  Butler  of  this  book  is  a 
photograph  taken  by  Alfred  in  1898.  It  is  a 
queer  mixture  of  an  anthropoid  ape  and  a  god, 
expressing  exactly  Butler's  own  view  of  evol- 
ution ;  the  god  is  in  the  making,  and  would 
be  a  little  bored  if  there  were  not  still  some- 
thing of  the  monkey  in  him.  Mr.  Jones  has 
not  left  the  monkey  out  of  his  book  any  more 
than  the  god  ;  it  will  increase  both  the  gaiety 
and  the  faith  of  nations. 


156 


Turgenev  .^^       <:^       o       o       o 

WHEN  you  enjoy  a  writer  thoroughly 
you  do  not  ask  yourself  whether  he  is 
superior  to  some  other  writer,  as,  when  you 
love  anyone,  you  do  not  ask  whether  he  is 
better  than  some  one  else.  It  is  when  we  have 
passed  out  of  the  fresh  enjoymentof  an  artist  that 
we  become  his  partisans.  Mr.  Edward  Garnett, 
unfortunately,  begins  his  Study  of  Turgenev 
as  a  partisan.  His  first  chapter  is  on  Tur- 
genev's  critics  and  detractors.  He  starts  in  a 
bad  temper  because  there  are  those  who  think 
Tolstoy  and  Dostoevsky  greater.  This  heresy, 
he  tells  us,  arose  in  Russia ;  and  he  will  have 
it  that  anyone  in  England  who  shares  it  is 
imitating  some  Russian.  Mr.  Maurice  Baring 
"  has  echoed  various  Russian  critics,"  he  is  not 
to  be  credited  with  an  opinion  of  his  own. 
And  Mr.  Conrad  in  his  Foreword  is  also  angry 
with  those  who  prefer  Dostoevsky.  "  You 
know  very  well,  my  dear  Edward,  that  if  you 
had  Antinous  himself  in  a  booth  of  the  world's 
fair,  and  killed  yourself  in  protesting  that  his 
157 


Essays  on  Books 

soul  was  as  perfect  as  his  body,  you  wouldn't 
get  one  per  cent,  of  the  crowd  struggling  next 
door  for  a  sight  of  the  double-headed  nightin- 
gale or  of  some  weak-kneed  giant  grinning 
through  a  horse  collar."  Thus  it  is  that  Mr. 
Conrad  expresses  his  own  preference  for  Tur- 
genev.  We  did  not  know  until  we  read  Mr. 
Garnetfs  book  that  there  was  this  prevailing 
depreciation  of  Turgenev ;  but  Mr.  Garnett 
tells  us  all  about  it,  and  works  himself  into  a 
rage  over  it,  just  as  if  he  were  an  antivivi- 
sectionist  or  a  Baconian.  So,  if  you  have 
read  Turgenev  innocently  and  enjoyed  him  as 
you  should,  you  will  probably  hurry  past  this 
first  chapter  on  critics  and  detractors  to  dis- 
cover what  Mr.  Garnett  has  to  say  when  he 
has  recovered  from  his  anger  at  those  who  do 
not  think  Turgenev  the  greatest  of  Russian 
novelists.  For,  after  aU,  what  does  it  matter 
if  A  and  B  prefer  Dostoevsky  to  Turgenev,  and 
say  so  ?  Life  is  too  short  for  these  literary 
feuds,  at  least  if  you  care  for  literature. 

Unfortunately,  Mr.  Garnett  never  escapes 
from  his  partisanship.  Throughout  the  book 
he  has  his  eye  on  Turgenev's  position  rather 
than  on  Turgenev  himself.  He  is  always  pro- 
testing that  he  is  a  perfect  Antinous;  and 
this  is  a  pity,  for  when  he  does  forget  to  wor- 
158 


Turgenev 

ship  his  idol  he  says  good  things  about  him 
and  his  characters,  as  that  his  Tatyana  in 
Smoke  "  is  born  to  corrupt,  but  never  to  be 
corrupted."  We  wish  that  he  had  not  been 
so  much  the  slave  of  his  enthusiasm ;  for 
Turgenev  is  now  far  enough  away  from  us 
both  in  time  and  in  fashion  to  be  treated 
justly.  But  for  Mr.  Garnett  he  is  still  a 
neglected  contemporary ;  and  he  writes  always 
as  if  he  must  shake  us  out  of  our  ignorance 
and  prejudice.  So,  much  of  his  book  seems 
to  belong  to  the  past ;  we  are  not  conscious 
of  any  prejudice  against  Turgenev,  and  we  do 
not  care  to  be  scolded  for  it. 

Yet,  perhaps,  the  world  has  grown  colder  to 
him  than  it  should  be,  and  it  is  worth  while 
to  inquire  the  reason  of  this.  We  have  always 
wondered,  for  instance,  why  Tolstoy  was  so 
much  irritated  by  him.  Mr.  Garnett  speaks 
of  his  "  lifelong  hostility  to  Turgenev's  genius, 
only  removed  by  the  •  latter's  death."  That 
seems  to  suggest  envy,  which  is  certainly  not 
the  explanation.  Perhaps  Turgenev  was  too 
much  of  an  artist  for  Tolstoy,  too  much 
specialized ;  for  there  was  nothing  Tolstoy 
hated  so  much  as  specialization.  His  book. 
What  is  Art  ?,  is  one  long  attack  on  the 
specialization  of  the  artist.  To  Tolstoy  and  to 
159 


Essays  on  Books 

Dostoevsky  writing  was  a  natural  process,  like 
talking ;  but  to  Turgenev  it  was  more  of  a 
ritual,  as  to  Flaubert.  He  wrote,  or  seemed 
to  write,  with  an  exquisite  naturalness;  he 
was  far  too  well  bred  to  be  shoppy  in  any- 
thing ;  but  he  looked  at  life  like  an  artist,  like 
one  who  was  going  to  make  use  of  it.  Tolstoy 
lived  it ;  and  his  writing  was  only  an  extra 
consciousness,  an  effort  to  live  yet  more  in- 
tensely in  words  than  in  actual  fact.  He  is 
like  a  man  who  sings  at  his  work  ;  whereas 
Turgenev  is  like  a  man  playing  an  instrument, 
a  very  big  man  playing  a  very  small  instru- 
ment. After  reading  A  House  of  Gentlefolk 
or  Fathers  and  Children,  one  is  filled  with  the 
sense  of  great  power  producing  a  very  small  and 
exquisite  sound.  Tolstoy's  books  are  full  almost 
to  confusion.  Turgenev's  are  exquisitely  empty 
like  a  Japanese  room.  It  is  not  a  barren  empti- 
ness, but  the  result  of  an  austere  inhibition ; 
everything  in  it  is  typical,  and  he  admits  no 
detail  irrelevant  to  the  type.  His  characters 
never  run  away  with  him,  or  with  themselves. 

What  passion,  what  knowledge,  what  ob- 
stinate questioning  is  implied  in  Bazarov, 
the  hero  of  Fathers  and  Children !  But  it  is 
all  implied.  Turgenev  will  not  speak  out 
about  it.  All  the  Russian  novelists  are 
1 60 


Tu 


rgen 


ev 


distant  to  their  readers  compared  with  the 
English,  compared  with  Dickens  or  Charlotte 
Bronte.  They  tell  us  more,  but  they  do  not 
confide ;  they  seem  to  speak  to  a  general 
abstract  public,  and  not  to  the  particular 
reader.  But  Turgenev  is  the  most  distant  of 
them  all ;  he  writes  almost  like  a  philosopher, 
as  if  he  would  disdain  to  convince  us  of  any- 
thing by  a  personal  appeal.  So  Bazarov  is 
like  a  thesis  come  to  life.  He  is  utterly  con- 
vincing while  we  read ;  but  he  is  not  quite 
human,  like  Levin  or  Myshkin,  because  he 
always  speaks  and  acts  in  character.  He  lacks 
the  richness,  the  irrelevance,  of  reality,  that 
last  illusion  which  a  writer  can  produce  only 
when  his  characters  produce  it  on  him,  when 
he  has  forgotten  his  design  in  them.  Tur- 
genev never  does  that ;  but  it  is  not  because 
of  the  aesthetic  poverty  of  his  mind.  We 
may  be  sure  that  he  knew  and  perceived  and 
felt  abundantly  ;  all  his  observations  are  too 
perfectly  relevant,  too  easily  precise,  to  have 
been  brought  in  because  he  wished  to  make 
use  of  them.  But  in  each  case  his  mind  was 
possessed  by  the  type  ;  and  he  would  not  allow 
the  individual  to  trespass  beyond  it. 

That,  perhaps,  was  what  irritated  Tolstoy, 
to   whom    men    were    utterly   individual,  and 
L  i6l 


Essays  on  Books 

for  whom  life  was  a  fierce  conflict  between  the 
individual  and  the  laws  of  God.  To  Turgenev 
it  was  rather  a  conflict  between  the  type  and 
the  laws  of  Nature.  The  anarchy  of  the  world 
for  Tolstoy  is  in  man  and  in  his  disobedience 
to  God.  Why  is  man  thus  disobedient  ?  That 
is  the  question  he  asks.  For  him  all  the 
sorrow  and  suff"ering  of  life  come  from  man 
himself,  from  the  individual  sinner.  But  to 
Turgenev  they  come  from  man's  incompati- 
bility with  Nature ;  and  the  question  he  asks 
is,  Why  is  the  -universe  what  it  is  ?  In  the 
last  scene  of  Fathers  and  Children,  where  the 
dead  Bazarov's  old  father  cries,  "  I  said  I 
should  rebel,  I  rebel !  I  rebel ! ""  Turgenev, 
says  Mr.  Garnett,  epitomizes  in  one  stroke  the 
infinite  aspiration,  the  eternal  insignificance, 
of  the  life  of  man.  That  is  always  the  drama 
for  him,  a  little  group  of  human  beings,  aspir- 
ing and  thwarted  by  a  surrounding  indifference. 
And  for  him  there  are  two  kinds  of  human 
beings:  those  who  aspire  and  are  thwarted, 
and  those  who  basely  comply  with  Nature  and 
become  themselves  part  of  that  which  thwarts. 
Of  Maria  Nikolaevna,  the  woman  who  seduces 
the  hero  in  Torrents  of  Spring,  Mr,  Garnett 
says  that  "in  her  ruthless  charm  she  is  the 
incarnation  of  a  cruel  principle  in  Nature," 
162 


Turge 


nev 


But  that  is  true  of  all  the  evil  characters  of 
Turgenev,  whether  they  are  lustful  like  her 
or  merely  worldly.  They  seem  to  be  con- 
spiring with  Nature  to  bring  the  dreams  of 
his  heroes  and  heroines  to  naught.  They  are 
like  the  big,  dull  boy  at  school  who  bullies 
and  derides  the  weak  and  sensitive.  For  him 
human  stupidity  is  part  of  the  stupidity  of  the 
universe,  and  the  few  who  rise  above  it  are 
crushed  by  it  or  by  circumstance.  And  yet  he 
does  passionately  believe  in  those  few  and  loves 
them  passionately ;  they  are  to  him  beautiful, 
inexplicable  flowers  in  a  barren  wilderness ; 
they  make  life  worth  living,  and  yet  fill  it 
with  pain.  Like  St.  Paul,  he  cries  that  there 
is  nothing  worth  having  but  love,  but  to  him 
love  is  a  beautiful,  forlorn  irrelevance  in  a  world 
unfitted  for  its  survival.  All  his  heroes  fight  a 
losing  battle,  not  merely  with  the  fools  of  the 
world,  but  with  the  nature  of  things.  And  so 
all  his  beauty  and  tenderness  seem  to  be  but  a 
pathetic  interlude,  a  strain  of  music  suddenly 
drowned  by  noise ;  and  the  point  of  the  book 
always  is  this  sudden  marring  of  the  music. 
At  the  end  you  are  not  thrilled  and  heartened 
by  the  sense  of  escape ;  rather,  you  are  cut  off' 
suddenly  from  what  you  love,  and  made  to  feel 
that  this  separation  is  for  ever,  is  in  the  nature 
163 


Essays  on  Books 

of  things.  The  mechanism  of  the  universe 
closes  in  upon  you  ;  and  it  is  mere  mechanism. 
Those  who  consent  to  live  like  machines  are 
the  winners  now  and  for  ever. 

Now  one  has  only  to  state  this  attitude  of 
Turgenev  to  see  that  it  is  not  the  modern 
attitude.  We,  whatever  we  believe,  do  not, 
like  him,  suffer  from  this  sense  of  the  treachery 
of  things.  There  is  to  us  more  mystery  than 
treachery  in  them ;  and  we  cannot,  like  him, 
divide  human  beings  into  sheep  and  goats,  into 
those  who  basely  consent  to  Nature  and  those 
who  are  piteously  crushed  by  her.  To  us,  as 
to  Tolstoy,  human  stupidity  is  unnatural 
rather  than  natural ;  it  is  rebellion  rather 
than  compliance.  In  fact,  as  a  thinker, 
Turgenev  is  old-fashioned.  That  "sad  philo- 
sophy "  of  his  which  Mr.  Garnett  finds  implied 
in  the  ending  of  A  House  of  Gentlefolk  is  to 
us  no  philosophy  at  all,  but  merely  the  cry  of 
one  who  has  been  hurt  by  life ;  and  all  his 
books  are  cries  of  pain,  though  the  cries  of  one 
who  knows  how  to  make  them  beautiful. 

In  his  last  illness  he  said :  "  When  my 
sufferings  are  unendurable,  I  follow  Schopen- 
hauer's advice.  I  analyse  my  sensations  and 
my  agony  departs  for  a  period."  In  all  his 
books  he  seems  to  be  doing  that,  and  with  the 
164 


Turgenev 

same  sad  purpose ;  he  is  an  artist  so  that  he 
may  not  suffer  too  much  from  life  by  losing 
himself  in  it.  Thus  to  him  his  art  is  more 
than  life  itself.  If  he  could,  he  would  be 
utterly  a  spectator ;  but  he  was  too  great  a  man, 
too  much  of  a  lover,  for  that.  So  for  him  'there 
is  in  all  the  affections  more  pathos  than  joy ; 
for  they  are  what  tie  us  to  life ;  they  give  us 
the  dream  of  happiness,  and  yet  make  it  im- 
possible. He  sings  St.  Paul's  Hymn  to  Love 
in  a  very  minor  key ;  and  it  is  to  him  not  love 
triumphant,  but  love  the  betrayer  and  the 
betrayed. 

So  perhaps  Mr.  Garnett  is  right  after  all, 
and  we  are  unjust  to  him.  We  cannot  under- 
stand what  he  is  so  sorrowful  about.  He 
belongs  to  the  past  of  the  Romantics  who  con- 
sented utterly  to  their  griefs.  To  the  modern 
mind  sorrow  is  something  to  be  conquered,  or 
to  be  laughed  away  as  a  little  unreal.  It  is  a 
proof  of  failure  rather  than  of  any  kind  of 
success ;  or  at  best  it  is  a  phase  from  which  we 
hope  and  try  to  escape.  But  Turgenev  settles 
down  in  it,  not  with  any  gross  luxury  of  woe, 
but  as  if  it  were  the  business  of  man  to  make 
pain  tolerable  by  analysing  it,  as  if  the  pleasure 
of  analysis  were  some  by-product  of  human  life 
which  man,  in  the  universal  unreason  of  things, 
165 


^  Essays  on  Books 

may  utilize,  as  we  utilize  coal-tar  in  our  drugs. 
But  we  cannot  now  consent  to  believe  in  the 
universal  unreason ;  and  so  Turgenev's  art, 
with  all  its  beauty,  seems  to  us  pathological, 
and,  as  we  read,  we  ask.  What  was  the  matter 
with  him  ? 

But  that  is  a  foolish  attitude ;  for  in  all 
great  writers  it  is  the  product  that  matters  and 
not  the  process.  So  we  feel  some  sympathy, 
after  all,  with  Mr.  Garnetfs  anger.  What 
irritates  him  is  our  want  of  sympathy ;  and  it 
irritates  him  the  more  because  he  still  shares 
Turgenev's  view  of  life,  and  is  therefore  able  to 
enjoy  him  like  a  contemporary.  That  cry — 
"  I  rebel !  I  rebel ! " — is  to  him  not  the  cry  of  a 
period,  not  the  expression  of  a  type,  but  the 
natural  everlasting  cry  of  humanity.  He  also 
rebels  ;  and  to  him  Turgenev  is  the  expression 
of  himself.  He  says  Yes  to  Turgenev''s  version 
of  life ;  but  most  of  us  now  say  No  to  it,  as 
Tolstoy  did.  It  is  not  that  life  seems  to  us 
more  pleasant  than  he  made  it,  but  that  it 
means  more.  Yet  it  is  foolish  to  be  hindered 
by  this  intellectual  difference  from  the  aesthetic 
enjoyment  of  him.  He  may  have  been  wrong 
intellectually,  and  in  his  comment  upon  life ; 
but  that  is  a  matter  of  argument.  The  beauty 
of  his  work  is  not  a  matter  of  argument.  But 
i66 


Turgenev 

we  can  see  it  only  if  we  sympathize  with  him, 
if  we  see  him  as  a  wonderful  and  beautiful 
human  being,  who  suffered  more  than  most 
men,  and  whose  books  express  his  suffering  in 
terms  of  beauty.  And  it  is  easy  to  sympathize 
with  him,  because  sympathy  is  the  secret  of  his 
own  excellence.  It  is  a  limited  sympathy,  for  he 
does  divide  men  and  women  very  sharply  into 
sheep  and  goats ;  he  is  afraid  of  the  stupid, 
as  he  is  afraid  of  Nature,  and  his  fear  ex- 
presses itself  in  cold  dislike.  But  for  the 
innocent,  the  passionate,  the  pure  in  heart,  for 
all  those  who  are  blest  in  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount,  he  has  a  tenderness  that  makes  music 
of  his  words  and  of  his  very  plot.  Protest,  if 
you  will,  that  life  is  not  like  this;  yet  you 
must  admit  that  life  itself  has  drawn  this 
music  out  of  a  beautiful  mind.  Turgenev's 
novels  are  nearer  to  poetry  than  any  others, 
because  his  comment  on  life  is  so  purely 
emotional.  Like  Schubert,  he  makes  his  songs 
out  of  sorrow ;  all  his  exquisite  precision  of 
detail,  all  his  skill  of  construction,  are  means 
of  expressing  that.  His  very  characters  are 
mouthpieces  of  it,  and  subdued  to  its  minor 
key.  So  his  books  have  the  unity  of  music; 
and,  if  Mr.  Garnett  chooses  to  value  this  unity 
above  all  other  qualities  of  art,  he  has  a  right 
167 


Essays  on  Books 

to  do  so.  I  began  his  book  with  some  irrita- 
tion, because  he  was  irritated.  I  ended  it  with 
sympathy,  both  for  him  and  for  Turgenev. 
Therefore  he  has,  after  all,  produced  on  me  the 
effect  which,  no  doubt,  he  wished  to  produce. 


1 68 


The  Clash  of  East  and  West  in  Thought 

MR.  STEPHEN  GRAHAM  tells  us  that 
all  that  is  positive  in  modern  Russian 
thought  springs  from  the  teaching  of  Solovyof. 
Introducing  his  book,  The  Justification  q/ 
the  Good,  he  says :  "  Tolstoy  we  know ; 
Dostoevsky  we  know ;  and  now  comes  a  new 
force  into  our  life,  Solovyof,  the  greatest  of  the 
three."  Certainly  T/ie  Justijication  of  the 
Good  is  worth  reading,  but  not  because 
Solovyof  is  greater  than  Tolstoy  or  Dostoevsky. 
They  remade  the  novel,  but  he  has  not  remade 
moral  philosophy ;  indeed,  he  has  failed  in 
that  which  he  set  out  to  do — namely,  to  justify 
the  good ;  and  he  has  failed  because  the  good 
is  not  entirely  good  to  him.  There  is  in  his 
mind  a  conflict  between  a  natural  Oriental 
pessimism  and  an  acquired  Western  optimism  ; 
and  this  conflict  makes  the  weakness,  and  the 
interest,  of  his  book.  He  himself  is  entirely 
unaware  of  it ;  to  himself  he  is  a  Christian ; 
but  his  Christianity  is  tainted  by  ancient 
169 


Essays  on  Books 

heresies  natural  to  the  Eastern  mind,  and  so 
natural  to  him  that  he  thinks  they  are  a  part 
of  Christianity.  In  actual  Christianity  there 
always  has  been  a  drift  towards  Manicheisra, 
checked  again  and  again  by  conscious  dogmatic 
statement  or  unconscious  revolt.  The  very 
affirmation  that  God  made  all  things  in  heaven 
and  earth  is  a  denial  of  Manicheism ;  but  here 
we  find  it  still  possessing  the  mind  of  a  trained 
philosopher  just  as  it  possessed  the  mind  of 
Tolstoy.  Again  it  comes  to  us  out  of  the 
East,  a  dark,  Asiatic  madness,  a  melancholy 
deeper  than  thought,  betraying  itself  in 
Solovyofs  very  conception  of  the  nature  of 
morality.  He  protests,  as  we  have  said,  that 
he  is  a  Christian,  and  denounces  Schopenhauer  ; 
yet,  wherever  he  is  a  Christian,  he  is  incon- 
sistent with  his  own  first  principles.  In  them 
he  is  a  follower  of  Schopenhauer,  or  rather  one 
of  those  Eastern  pessimists  whom  Schopenhauer 
followed  with  a  European  zest  that  denied  his 
own  pessimism.  Schopenhauer  was  consistent 
in  thought,  but  his  mood,  his  cheerful  malice, 
contradicted  his  thought;  Solovyof  is  incon- 
sistent in  thought,  but  underlying  that  in- 
consistency there  is  a  mood  of  despondency 
which  betrays  itself  whenever  he  speaks  with 
most  conviction. 

170 


Clash  of  East  and  West  in  Thought 

He  professes  to  be  an  advocate  of  the  uni- 
verse ;  but  his  heart  is  not  in  the  work,  and  he 
fails  to  make  the  universe  seem  attractive. 
That  is  the  mark  of  the  true  pessimist;  try 
as  he  will,  he  cannot  make  us  like  his  version 
of  the  universe;  the  more  he  praises  it,  the 
more  we  rebel.  At  best  he  can  only  preach 
contentment,  and  we  cannot  be  content  to 
be  content  with  the  universe ;  we  must  finally 
side  with  exultation  or  with  despair. 

Solovyofs  pessimism  betrays  itself  at  once 
in  his  account  of  "the  primary  data  of 
morality."  According  to  him,  "  the  funda- 
mental feelings  of  shame,  pity,  and  reverence 
exhaust  the  sphere  of  man's  possible  moral 
relations  to  that  which  is  below  him,  that 
which  is  on  a  level  with  him,  that  which  is 
above  him."  Pity,  for  him,  is  the  origin  of 
love  and  is  itself  a  more  moral  feeling  than 
love.  He  believes  that,  because  he  believes 
that  all  good  has  its  origin  in  pain ;  he  is 
unable  to  conceive  of  a  good  state  of  mind  that 
is  not  painful  to  him  who  experiences  it. 
"  Love  in  itself,"  he  says,  "  or  love  in  general, 
is  not  a  virtue;  the  virtue  behind  it,  the 
unconditioned  virtue,  is  always  pity."  But 
this  is  contrary  to  the  Christian  faith,  and 
contrary  also,  we  believe,  to  all  human  ex- 
171 


Essays  on  Books 

perience.     Solovyofs   very  psychology  is   per- 
verted   by    his    pessimism ;    of    the    mother, 
whether  human    or   animal,  he   says  that  no 
mental  state  but  pity  "  can  express  her  original 
solidarity  with  her  weak,  helpless,  piteous  off- 
spring   wholly   dependent    upon    her."      But, 
according  both  to  the  Christian  faith  and  to 
experience,  a  mother's  love  is  deeper  than  pity  ; 
pity  is  only  an  incident  of  it.     Solovyof  would 
persuade  us  that  love,  like  all  good  things,  is 
necessarily  painful  in  its  origin ;    it  comes  of 
suffering  the  pains  and  sorrows  of  others,  and 
its  joy  is  but  the  result  of  that  suffering.     But, 
according  to  the  Christian  faith,  love  is  deeper 
than    both    joy   and    sorrow  —  these   are    but 
incidents  of  it  which  it  accepts  and  to  which 
it  gives  a  quality,  a  meaning,  they  lack  without 
it.     And,  as   a  fact,  the   mother,   human   or 
animal,  is  not  always  pitying  her  piteous  off- 
spring.    The  cat,  the  best  of  mothers,  delights 
in  her  kittens,  which  are  far  from  always  piteous. 
The  natural  tie  between  her  and  them,  the  tie 
between  any  mother  and  her  child,  is  not  pity, 
it  is  motherhood  and  childhood,  which  means 
love. 

But    Solovyof,    in    denying    that   love   is   a 
virtue,  betrays  the  fact  that,  in  his  profound 
pessimism,  he  does  not  know  the  meaning  of 
172 


Clash  of  East  and  West  in  Thought 

the  word  love.  "  Selfish  love  for  oneself  and 
one's  property,  passionate  love  of  drink  or  of 
horse  racing,  is  not  reckoned  as  a  virtue."  But 
these  are  not  love.  Men  cannot  love  them- 
selves ;  self-love  is  only  a  metaphor,  a  redtoctio 
ad  ahsurdum  of  egotism.  It  means  that  the 
egotist  is  so  incapable  of  love  that  he  would 
love  himself  if  he  could.  Self-love  is  a  word 
for  a  negative,  meaning  the  absence  of  love  for 
others;  and  when  we  speak  of  the  love  of 
property  or  drink,  we  also  use  the  word  meta- 
phorically ;  we  mean  that  a  man  commits  the 
absurdity  of  behaving  as  if  it  were  possible  to 
love  these  things.  Solovyof  quotes  the  words 
of  St.  John — "  Love  not  the  world  " — which, 
he  says,  are  an  expression  of  the  fundamental 
principle  of  asceticism.  But  asceticism  itself 
is  not  fundamental,  except  for  pessimists  like 
Solovyof.  It  is  a  negative  means  to  a  positive 
end,  a  means  to  love.  When  we  say  that  a 
man  loves  the  world,  or  anything  else  that 
cannot  be  an  object  of  love,  we  mean  that  he 
is,  by  some  kind  of  egotism,  preventing  himself 
from  loving.  Love  is  self  -  forgetfulness  in 
something  that  can  be  loved,  but  Solovyof  does 
not  really  believe  in  the  existence  of  that  which 
can  be  loved  for  its  own  sake.  He  tries,  but 
unconsciously,  instinctively,  he  fails.  Still  he 
173 


Essays  on  Books 

says  that  love  of  our  neighbour  has  its  source 
in  pity,  and  love  of  God  in  reverence,  which 
means  to  him  fear  or  gratitude.  He  is  too 
despondent  to  affirm  in  either  that  quality 
which  directly  moves  us  to  love.  The  great 
positive  passion  does  not  exist  for  him  because 
to  him  the  universe,  God  Himself,  is  negative, 
forbidding;  and  all  good  consists  in  refusing 
and  in  the  pain  of  refusal.  Thus  he  says,  in 
a  curious  passage,  that  to  share  another's  joys 
is  not  so  good  in  itself  as  to  share  his  sorrows. 

Participation  in  the  pleasures  of  others  may 
always  have  an  element  of  self-interest.  Even 
in  the  case  of  an  old  man  sharing  the  joy  of  a 
child  doubt  may  be  felt  with  regard  to  the 
altruistic  nature  of  the  sentiment ;  for  in  any 
case  it  is  pleasant  for  the  old  man  to  refresh 
the  memory  of  his  own  happy  childhood.  On 
the  contrary,  all  genuine  feeling  of  regret  at 
the  suffering  of  others,  whether  moral  or 
physical,  is  painful  for  the  person  who  experi- 
ences that  feeling,  and  is  therefore  opposed  to 
his  egotism.  This  is  clear  from  the  fact  that 
sincere  grief  about  others  disturbs  our  personal 
joy,  damps  our  mirth,  that  is,  proves  to  be  in- 
compatible with  the  state  of  selfish  satisfaction. 

One  could  not  imply  more  clearly  that  God 
does  not  wish  us  to  be  happy,  that  He  has 
made  a  universe  in  which  we  can  be  good  only 
through  suffering.  But  the  Christian  doctrine 
174 


Clash  of  East  and  West  in  Thought 

of  love  asserts  that  he  who  loves  will  consent 
to  both  the  joys  and  the  sorrows  of  love,  that 
love  itself  is  good,  not  joy  or  sorrow. 

Joy  and  grief  are  woven  fine, 
A  garment  for  the  soul  divine. 
And  when  this  we  truly  know, 
Safely  through  the  world  we  go. 

A  state  of  mind  is  not  good  because  it  is 
painful ;  the  joy  we  take  in  the  joys  of  others 
is  not  egotistical  because  it  is  joy ;  indeed, 
the  egotist  is  prevented  by  his  egotism  from 
feeling  it.  The  good  state  of  mind  is  love; 
and  it  is  to  be  valued  because  it  is  love,  whether 
it  brings  us  joy  or  sorrow.  Solovyof  confuses 
pleasure  with  joy  ;  participation  in  the  pleasures 
of  others  will  have  an  element  of  self-interest, 
if  it  is  not  the  result  of  love  but  of  the  desire 
to  share  the  pleasures.  But  love  cannot  come 
of  the  desire  to  share  pleasures,  although  it 
alone  enables  us  to  share  both  joy  and  sorrow. 
Here,  as  elsewhere,  the  psychology  of  Solovyof 
is  wrong,  because,  for  him,  the  universe  forbids. 
But  it  is  when  he  comes  to  speak  of  shame 
and  the  sexual  instinct  that  his  Manichean 
madness  most  clearly  betrays  itself.  Con- 
science, he  says,  is  simply  the  development  of 
shame.  "  The  whole  moral  life  of  man,  in  all 
its  three  aspects,  springs  from  a  root  that  is 
175 


Essays  on  Books 

distinctly   human   and    essentially   foreign   to 
the  animal  world,"     But  shame  is  a  negative 
feeling,  it  is  dislike,  it  says.  Do  not;    and  if 
conscience,    if  our    whole    moral   life,    springs 
from  this  negative  origin,  it  loses  value  for  us 
the  moment  we  are  aware  of  the  fact.     We 
cannot   consent   to  a  universe  in  which  that 
is    so.      Imputing   this   source    to   the  good, 
Solovyof  at  once  fails  to  justify  it  for  us ;  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  itself  is  for  him  a  negative, 
to  which  we  attain  by  being  ashamed,  not  of 
"this   world,"  but  of  our  very  selves.     True, 
he  says  that  "  the  object  of  condemnation  in 
asceticism    is    not    material    nature  as   such. 
From  no  point  of  view  can  it   be  rationally 
maintained  that  nature  considered  objectively 
— whether  in  its  essence  or  in  its  appearances — 
is  evil,"     But   here  it   is   only   the   acquired 
Western  part  of  him  that  speaks,  and  it  is 
contradicted  in  a  few  pages  by  the  instinctive 
Oriental,     He  says  that  the  animal  life  in  man 
must  be  subordinate  to  the  spiritual ;  but  he 
means  that  it  must  be  denied  and  destroyed 
by  the  spiritual. 

The  moral  question  with  regard  to  the  sexual 

function  is  in  the  first  place  the  question  of 

one's  inner  relation  to  it,  of  passing  judgment 

upon  it  as  such.      How   are  we   inwardly  to 

176 


Clash  of  East  and  West  in  Thought 

regard  this  fact  from  the  point  of  view  of 
the  final  norm,  of  the  absolute  good — are  we 
to  approve  of  it  or  to  condemn  it  ...  to 
affirm  and  develop  or  to  deny,  limit,  and  finally 
to  abolish  it  ? 

Solovyof  says  we  are  to  abolish  it. 

The  carnal  means  of  production  is  for  man  an 
evil  .  .  .  our  moral  relation  to  this  fact  must  be 
absolutely  negative.  We  must  adopt  the  path 
that  leads  to  its  limitation  and  abolition  ;  how 
and  when  it  will  be  abolished  in  humanity  as 
a  whole  or  even  in  ourselves  is  a  question  that 
has  nothing  to  do  with  Ethics. 

Here  is  the  very  doctrine  of  the  Kreutzer. 
Sonata;  but  in  Solovyof  it  is  supported  by 
a  dark  mysticism  which  he  never  clearly  ex- 
presses. According  to  him  the  carnal  means 
of  production  is  somehow  the  cause  of  death. 
"Man's  final  acceptance  of  the  kingdom  of 
death,  which  is  maintained  and  perpetuated 
by  carnal  reproduction,  deserves  absolute  con- 
demnation." Such,  he  says,  is  "the  positive 
Christian  point  of  view,  which  decides  this  all- 
important  question  according  to  the  spirit  and 
not  according  to  the  letter  and,  consequently, 
without  any  external  exclusiveness."  True, 
the  Manichean  drift  of  Christianity  has  always 
existed ;    but  always  Christianity  has  resisted 

M  177 


Essays  on  Books 

it,  always  its  bright  positive  has  overcome  that 
dark  negative ;  and  even  Solovyof  allows  a 
practical  compromise  with  his  own  doctrine, 
though  the  doctrine  itself  he  insists  is  true, 
in  the  following  curious  passage : — 

The  idea  that  the  preaching  of  sexual 
abstinence,  however  energetic  and  successful, 
may  prematurely  stop  the  propagation  of  the 
human  race  and  lead  to  its  annihilation  is  so 
absurd  that  one  may  justly  doubt  the  sincerity 
of  those  who  hold  it.  It  is  not  likely  that 
anyone  can  seriously  fear  this  particular  danger 
for  humanity.  So  long  as  the  change  of 
generations  is  necdfesary  for  the  development 
of  the  human  kind,  the  taste  for  bringing 
that  change  about  will  certainly  not  disappear 
in  men. 

He  does  not  see  that,  if  the  change  of  genera- 
tions is  necessary  for  the  development  of  the 
human  kind,  it  is  the  darkest  pessimism,  im- 
plying the  malignity  of  God  Himself,  to  hold 
that  the  process  necessary  for  that  change  is 
itself  sinful. 

But  Solovyof,  as  soon  as  he  comes  to  deal 
with  economics,  escapes  from  his  own  mad- 
ness, and  indeed  supplies  an  antidote  to  it. 
Here  he  is  subject  to  Western  thought,  here 
he  is  no  longer  a  pessimist  or  a  Manichee, 
and  here  he  escapes  from  his  psychological 
178 


Clash  of  East  and  West  in  Thought 

error.  In  the  chapter  on  the  Economic 
Question,  he  insists  that  man  is  not  entirely 
an  economic  being,  that  the  economic  man 
is  a  figment  of  bad  metaphysics ;  and  he  points 
out,  very  shrewdly,  that  Marxian  Socialism 
has  been  infected  with  the  error  of  the 
*'  bourgeois "  economics  which  it  set  out  to 
destroy. 

The  defect  of  the  orthodox  school  of  political 
economy — the  Liberal,  or  more  exactly  the 
Anarchical,  school — is  that  it  separates  on 
principle  the  economic  sphere  fx-om  the  moral. 
The  defect  of  Socialism  is  that  it  more  or  less 
confuses  or  wrongly  identifies  these  two  distinct, 
though  indivisible,  spheres.  From  the  pluto- 
cratic point  of  view  the  normal  man  is,  in  the 
first  place,  a  capitalist,  and  then,  per  accidens^ 
a  citizen,  head  of  a  family,  an  educated  man, 
member  of  some  religious  union,  etc.  Similarly, 
from  the  Socialist  point  of  view  all  other 
interests  become  insignificant  and  retreat  into 
the  background — if  they  do  not  disappear 
altogether  before  the  economic  interest. 

In  fact,  the  error  of  the  economic  maniacs  is 
of  the  same  nature  as  the  error  of  the  sex- 
maniacs.  Both  find  but  one  content  in  human 
nature,  whether  it  be  sex  or  the  struggle  for 
life;  and  Marxian  Socialism  is  based  upon 
that  monomania,  like  plutocracy.  Both,  says 
179 


Essays  on  Books 

Solovyof,  have  the  same  motto — "  Man  liveth 
by  bread  alone."  "  The  struggle  between  the 
two  hostile  camps  is  not  one  of  principle.  .  .  . 
One  party  is  concerned  with  the  material 
welfare  of  the  capitalist  minority,  the  other 
with  the  material  welfare  of  the  labour 
majority."  It  could  not  be  better  put,  though 
it  is  not  true  of  all  kinds  of  Socialism  ;  and 
in  refuting  it  Solovyof  also  refutes  his  own 
Mauicheism.     "  Economic  relations,"  he  says, 

are  based  upon  a  simple  and  ultimate  fact, 
which  cannot,  as  such,  be  deduced  from  the 
moral  principle — the  fact,  namely,  that  work, 
labour,  is  necessary  to  the  maintenance  of 
life.  .  .  .  The  necessity  to  work  in  order  to 
obtain  the  means  of  livelihood  is,  indeed,  a 
matter  of  fate  and  independent  of  human  will. 
But  it  is  merely  an  impetus  which  spurs  men 
to  activity,  the  further  course  of  that  activity 
being  determined  by  psychological  and  moral, 
not  by  economic,  causes. 

And,  again,  "  productive  labour,  possession 
and  enjoyment  of  its  results,  is  one  of  the 
aspects  of  human  life  or  one  of  the  spheres 
of  human  activity."  Now  apply  all  this  ad- 
mirable doctrine  to  "  carnal  reproduction." 
It  also  is  a  simple  and  ultimate  fact,  which 
cannot  be  deduced,  as  such,  from  the  moral 
principle.  It  also  is  necessary  to  the  maintenance 
1 80 


Clash  of  East  and  West  in  Thought 

of  human  life;  and  the  fact  that  it  is  so  is 
independent  of  the  human  will.  To  say  that 
it  is  evil  in  itself  is  as  if  one  said  that  the 
instinct  of  self-preservation  was  evil  in  itself; 
which  is  to  condemn  the  nature  of  the  universe, 
as  we  know  it.  Solovyof,  when  he  comes  to 
economics,  does  not  condemn  the  nature  of 
the  universe  or  of  man,  because  economics  is 
a  wholly  Western  study  and  he  has  not  read 
his  own  Eastern  heresy  into  it.  But,  inevitably, 
if  he  had  thought  consistently  he  would  have 
been  forced  either  by  his  economic  doctrine 
to  give  up  his  Manicheism,  or  by  his  Manicheism 
to  give  up  his  economic  doctrine.  The  two 
are  incompatible,  but  Solovyof  did  not  discover 
it.  So  the  interest  of  his  book  is  not  in  its 
philosophy,  but  in  that  conflict  between  East 
and  West  which  divides  it  into  two  inconsistent 
parts.  The  very  sincerity  of  the  writer  makes 
the  conflict  the  more  patent.  Here  we  have 
in  philosophical  terms  the  tragedy  of  Tolstoy's 
last  years ;  for  Manicheism  makes  life  im- 
possible ;  and  that  is  why  Christianity,  which 
says  that  life  is  not  only  possible  but  glorious, 
must  always  condemn  it. 


I8i 


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MORRISON    AND  GIBB    LTD. 

EDINBURGH 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  AT  LOS  ANGELES 

THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 

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OCT  1  3  1964 

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